Master of the Crossroads (4 page)

Sometime after full dark the rain broke off with a shock of sudden silence, soon filled with rising voices of insects in the trees. The shift in sound was sufficient to rouse Doctor Hébert from the heavy sleep into which he had fallen. Nanon had gone out, leaving him a lit candle. He washed himself quickly, dressed, and went onto the gallery, where he found his sister Elise and her husband Xavier Tocquet already gathered with the Frenchman who had somewhat mysteriously turned up that morning. Tocquet was drinking a glass of rum and rolling an unlit Spanish cigar in his fingers. He had not troubled to put on shoes, and for that the doctor rather envied him.

“Ah,” said Bruno Pinchon, turning to greet the doctor.
“Voilà le
propriétaire!”

“What?” the doctor said, bemused. In point of fact, Habitation Thibodet had passed to Elise on the death of her first husband, and so the plantation now technically belonged to Xavier Tocquet if it could be said to belong to anyone in the current state of affairs. But Pinchon carried on, excitedly, before the doctor could correct him.

“But it’s marvelous here!” the guest declared. He was a smallish man, about the doctor’s height but thinner, with disheveled wings of black hair and small, dark, moist eyes. He had also been drinking rum, perhaps to excess, the doctor thought.

“The men at work, the fields in good order—practically everything is well in hand,” Pinchon enthused. “It’s a miracle, you would not believe the disorders I’ve seen.”

“Indeed,” said the doctor, who had himself been borne along by several different torrents of fire and blood since the slaves of Saint Domingue had first revolted against their masters almost three years previously. He looked for relief toward the others at the table, but Tocquet had leaned back out of the circle of light, his eyes shadowed in their deep sockets; he nibbled the end of his cigar as if in a trance. As for Elise, she had arranged herself in an almost iconic pose of flirtation, eyes bright and lips just parted, but the doctor knew she might be thinking of almost anything else and that it was unlikely she was listening to anything Pinchon had said.

“Now this little popinjay of a nigger general . . .” Pinchon lowered his voice and become confidential. “That one must be easy enough to lead, no?” He made an obscure movement with his hands, fingers crooked, as if shaping clay. “As he has fallen in with the schemes of the Spanish, he might just as well be directed . . .” Pinchon winked, and waited.

Again the doctor was at a loss for a sensible reply. But at that moment boots came thumping up the steps and captains Maillart and Vaublanc joined the party, moving into the circle of light. Pinchon was distracted by introductions, and immediately following, the black housemaid Zabeth appeared from the kitchen, and with the help of Elise and Nanon began to serve the table.

Dinner was
soupe à giraumon,
followed by barbecued goat with hot peppers, brown peas and rice and chunks of yam. No wine, but a carafe of cool spring water and a bottle of rum stood on the table, along with a pitcher of lemonade. Between serving the courses Elise and Nanon sat and ate with the men; Zabeth had withdrawn to the kitchen. The two children had eaten beforehand and were playing on the gallery. Sophie, nearly four years old, came frequently to pluck at Elise’s skirt and prattle. A plate of sliced mangoes was served for dessert and the little girl took bits of it, birdlike, from her mother’s fork. Paul, the younger child, had just learned to pull himself to his feet; he crab-walked from one baluster of the gallery rail to the next. Whenever he reached the stairs by this route Nanon must jump up to restrain him from tumbling away into the dark.

Conversation was often thus interrupted, and was desultory in any case. The doctor noticed that Pinchon’s garrulity was curbed by his appetite; he ate like one who’s been on short rations for some time. When dinner was done, Elise and Nanon went into the house with the children. Zabeth cleared the plates, and when she had finished, Captain Vaublanc produced a greasy pack of cards from his coat pocket.

“Join us,” he said to the table at large, as he began to shuffle.

Tocquet twisted his long hair back over his left shoulder, leaning into the candle to light his cigar. “Not at such stakes,” he said as he settled back, exhaling.

Vaublanc grunted, unsurprised. His glance passed over the doctor and stopped on Pinchon.

“Eh, I find myself a little out of pocket,” Pinchon said. “If the gentlemen would accept my note . . .”

“But of course,” said Vaublanc, nodding toward some smudged sheets of accounting which Captain Maillart had just then spread across the table. “Our own notes are . . . most detailed.”

Pinchon squinted at the papers, blanched, and retreated.
“Bien, c’est
trop cher pour moi,”
he said. Too rich for my blood.

“As you wish,” said Maillart with glum resignation. “Though it’s tedious with only two.”

For a moment it was silent except for the cards snapping on the table. The three nonparticipants watched the play. Tocquet poured himself a half-measure of rum and sipped it slowly while he smoked. Vaublanc and Maillart were gambling for scraps of paper, each inscribed with the name of a slave. The game had been going on in this way for some weeks. Doctor Hébert had no idea how Captain Maillart had first staked himself to it, for he had few assets other than the army commission he had thrown over (as Vaublanc had his own) when news came from France of the King’s execution. But Maillart was either the more skillful or more fortunate player, and by this time he had to his credit almost half of the six hundred slaves which Vaublanc, nephew of a wealthy planter of Acul, could claim as his eventual inheritance. Of course the Acul plantation had been burned to the ground in the first insurrection of 1791 (like everything else on the northern plain), its buildings razed, and its slaves scattered who knew where? The officers might as well have been playing for beans or buttons; the doctor thought that Maillart understood this principle well enough, though he could not have said as much for Vaublanc, with whom he was less intimate. It was probable that at least some of the slaves of that Acul plantation were now serving as foot soldiers right here in Toussaint’s army.

Tocquet emptied the last swallow from his glass and rose. Without taking leave, he walked barefoot down from the gallery into the yard. Starlight silvered his loose white shirt, and his cigar head glowed and shrank in the darkness.

Pinchon pulled at the doctor’s elbow and steered him away from the table.
“Un homme un peu farouche, celui-là,”
he said, looking toward the diminishing glow of Tocquet’s cigar. A wild man, that one.

“If he gambles he prefers to choose games he can win,” the doctor said.

“I don’t mean that,” Pinchon said, drawing the doctor along toward the farthest end of the gallery. “All very well to acknowledge one’s half-breed bastard—if one must—but to seat one’s mulatto whore at table? and with white ladies . . . Well, and the man didn’t even have on shoes.”

“You’re saying that—” the doctor broke off with his mouth still open. He was beginning to grasp the nature of Pinchon’s confusions: if the newcomer assumed that he were married to Elise, that would explain he’d been taken for the proprietor of the plantation. A casual observer might well be inclined to pair Nanon with Tocquet, who was certainly the more obviously unconventional of the two white men presently occupying the
grand’case.

“Nothing serious,” Pinchon was going on. He had turned to face the card players again, but spoke to the doctor in a half-whisper, partially shielding his mouth with his hand. “Such conduct might gratify the egalitarianism of our so-called Commissioner Sonthonax, but I tell you that an English protectorate will soon put an end to all such fantasies. I myself, sir, am just come from Saint Marc, with an offer from General Whitelocke for the submission of this rabble here. Of course your Toussaint Whatever-he-calls-himself and the other principal niggers can be paid off . . . but to bring the matter forward I must know who really is in charge of them.”

Pinchon closed his mouth and looked at the doctor cannily. The doctor watched the card players, halfway down the gallery, enclosed in a moist nimbus of light. A large green moth swirled toward their candle. Maillart flipped it away with his fingers but it soon returned. Vaublanc cursed the moth and batted it away with his hat.

“Your discretion is admirable,” Pinchon said. “Perhaps it’s better so. In any case the old buffoon has engaged me to write his letters for him”—he winked—“which should make the affair much easier to conclude.”

Still the doctor said nothing. Retracing his way through Pinchon’s first remarks, he struck against the phrases
half-breed bastard
and
mulatto whore.
He had been on the verge of explaining to Pinchon the extent of his misapprehensions, but now he decided he had just as well let the man work it out for himself.

At first light Guiaou’s eyes opened to greet a small striped lizard poised on the matting of damp leaves just beyond the shelter he had erected. The lizard’s tail had been broken off and it was just beginning to sprout a new one from the stump. He made no attempt to catch it; he was not half so hungry as before.

Also he still had his cassava bread, which he took with him when Quamba rose and beckoned him to follow. They followed a well-beaten trail to a clearing where many men were seated in a circle. An old woman was grinding coffee in the hollowed stump of a tree, using a staff as tall as herself for a pestle, and another was roasting corn over a charcoal fire. The men held out gourds or handmade clay vessels or oddments of European crockery to receive their coffee ration. Quamba was served by a pretty young woman with glossy black skin, her hair swept up in a red and gold-spangled
mouchwa têt.

“Merbillay,” Quamba said, watching Guiaou’s eyes track her as she passed. Quamba shared his cup with Guiaou, who had none of his own, and Guiaou passed him half of the remaining cassava bread. Someone gave each of them a steaming ear of corn.

They assembled for drill behind the cane mill on the flat ground where the
bagasse
was stacked. Guiaou’s group was commanded by the same Frenchman in Spanish uniform he’d seen the day before, who was called Captain Maillart. A black officer was with him, the Captain Moyse. Under the orders of these two, the men formed in a square, marched, reversed, shouldered arms, presented them, knelt and aimed but did not fire. The movements were well-schooled, automatic—Guiaou was accustomed to them from his service with the Swiss, though perhaps the drill was a little crisper here. His arms and legs remembered to respond without thinking. No thought was in him, only his limbs answering the voices of the officers and a cool vacant space behind his eyes.

Maillart’s voice cracked and the men formed a double column and quick-marched off the improvised drill field. Guiaou’s neck and shoulders began to itch. He had been marched in and out of cane fields in columns like this one, encouraged by a whip, and made to sing. He had been marched on and off slave ships with an iron collar riveted around his neck. Now they were marching through the small
carrés
of cane, and other men were working there, but the soldiers did not stop. In silence the double column began to climb the terraces of coffee trees, Captain Moyse at the head and Captain Maillart in the rear. The hillside was steep but Moyse urged them, his voice lower and broader than the white man’s, so that they did not slacken speed.

Where the coffee ended a trail began, rising through clumps of bamboo and twisted flamboyants clinging to the cliff side—a red slash in the rocky earth. The men went up in single file, swinging into double time at Maillart’s order, stooping low and sometimes scrabbling with the free hand to keep going. When the ground leveled off at the ridge top, Maillart’s voice snapped again and the black soldiers dispersed from the trail like a flock of stone-scattered birds, rolling into cover of the brush and taking up firing positions, which they held just long enough for Guiaou to breathe more easily. The air was thick. It was very hot. Below, a long way below, were the buildings and small cane pieces of Habitation Thibodet, tucked into pockets among the sudden hills.

Captain Maillart appeared on the trail, his sword drawn, expression focused—a hundred yards farther, Moyse also showed himself. At the word of Moyse the column re-formed and the men went over the crest of the ridge at a loping dog trot and scrambled down the opposite slope and then climbed the next
morne
at the same fast pace as before. Here there was no trail at all and the ground was wet and slick—a chunk of earth ripped away under Quamba’s feet and he began to fall backward, but Guiaou steadied him from behind and urged him on so that they did not lose much speed. At the height of the next hill they scattered from the trail again to find firing positions under cover. Guiaou used the little time to check his cartridges and the mechanism of his musket, and then to breathe. When Captain Maillart showed himself again, he was sweating very much, much more than the black men sweated. Of course he wore a full uniform, and had kept up the pace in the tall, heavy boots he had on his feet, while most of the black soldiers were barefoot and wore little but their trousers and their weapons.

They marched down the hill at an easier pace and traversed the squares of cane at a different angle. By the time they reached the area behind the cane mill, the sun had climbed almost to its height. There they were given a ration of water and then dismissed.

Doctor Hébert was standing knee-deep in water in the swampy area behind and above the
grand’case,
when Captain Maillart, sweat-soaked and breathless, climbed the little colline to find him there. When he saw the captain approaching, the doctor straightened from his work and pulled off the broad-brimmed straw hat he wore to protect his balding head from the sun. He dipped the hat in the water and then replaced it on his head. The hat had been soaked so often it had lost all shape and the brim hung down the back of his neck like a wet rag.