Master of the Crossroads (16 page)

Elise, who had caught her lower lip in her top teeth at the mention of the marriage, now released it thoughtfully.

“Are you quite finished?”

“Is it not sufficient?” the doctor said. “I don’t mean to quarrel with you, but think of our father’s house—our mother, ten years in her grave. Imagine how such an affair would be viewed in Lyons.”

“In Lyons, we would make a pretty pair, the two of us.” Elise laughed, and after a moment the doctor joined her with a reluctant chuckle.

Sophie came up to the grassy slope, holding out her dripping skirt in a giggling display. Elise made a movement of mock retreat. “Keep your distance, child,” she said. “Yes, yes, you
may
take it off.”

Sophie undid her skirt and frolicked, naked, back into the pool. The doctor noted that Paul had already disrobed. Zabeth was spreading their wet clothing to dry in the sunshine that poured over the slope.

“The truth of it is,” Elise said, “the society here will forgive almost any
faiblesse d’amour,
and much more easily than in Europe—so long as it does not cross the color line. I don’t say there’s justice in it, but things are as they are. You acknowledge the boy—perhaps it’s right that you should. But what of his education? His future, what will it be? And if there should be other children?”

“I have lost the habit of pondering the future here,” the doctor said, and realized as he spoke that his words were true. This place seemed to be without a sense of time. There was the moment as you lived it; all others were illusory. Nanon had helped to teach him this, in her somewhat specialized fashion. Then again, there had been many occasions in Saint Domingue when his mere survival to the end of the day, or to the next dawn, had seemed future enough—as much as he could contemplate.

Now Elise had summoned up the future; it appeared before him as a cloudy menace which he had no ability to plan for or control. He stood up, nodding and blinking, and dusted off the back of his trousers.

“Where are you going?” Elise said.

“A little botanizing,” the doctor muttered vaguely.

He made a wavering motion with his left hand and turned from her, walking around the borders of the pool and then behind the bearded figs. It was peaceful here, and through the streams of the trees’ hanging roots, he caught glimpses of the children, their pale skins flashing in the water, heard them laughing as they splashed each other. But his mind continued to track forward on the path Elise had laid out for it.

What, after all,
would
become of the boy? In the larger scheme of things the doctor knew that his sister was right: such children did bring difficulties, being neither black nor white. In principle they constituted a third race, and their weight in the politics and warfare of this country was considerable. But the doctor had not applied such reasoning to the case of his son Paul, who had, unmistakably, the ears of his own grandfather, who had appeared to him in the guise of a small and amiable human animal. Now the word
son
seemed to thunder in his ears, and also he felt that his conversation with Elise was somehow a betrayal of Nanon (though he himself had said nothing to betray her—had he?). Such thoughts were misery; he must put an end to them somehow.

Meanwhile Toussaint had been some days away from the camp at Ennery, at Marmelade perhaps, or at one of the other strong places that ran from Gonaives back to the Spanish frontier. He explained his comings and goings to no one, arrived and departed with small warning.

At dawn of the day following the family picnic by the lily pond, he appeared on the gallery, and took coffee in silence, failing to rise to any conversational bait that either the doctor or Elise trolled past him. Breakfast done, he retreated to the cane mill.

Doctor Hébert spent the balance of the morning on hospital rounds, changing dressings and attending to some scattered cases of fever or dysentery. There were two infirmaries now: the one he had established for the slaves of Habitation Thibodet, and another in the tented encampment of Toussaint’s soldiers. Most of the injuries were accidental at the moment, for there had not been much fighting of late, though some of the black soldiers nursed old wounds, slow to heal. The doctor was attended on his tour by the woman Merbillay, who had a growing skill with herbal brews, and by the newcomer Guiaou, who seemed fascinated with any medical proceeding, his interest perhaps inspired, the doctor thought, by the scars of the terrible wounds from which he had himself recovered.

At the noon hour he lunched with Nanon and Elise on the gallery of the
grand’case.
The meal passed pleasantly enough, but with little conversation. The air was heavy and still and it seemed almost too hot and oppressive to talk at all. The encounter came to a silent conclusion; Tocquet struck fire to his cigar and smoked. The other white people retired for the customary afternoon siesta, retreating from the most intense heat of the afternoon. The doctor lay abed with Nanon, comfortable in her affection, although he was too uneasy in his mind to rise to her caresses. At length he took her hands and folded them together and held them with one of his own; Nanon smiled at him, unoffended, and rolled her back to him. He lay with one hand cupping her belly, breathing the sweet scent of her hair and the nape of her neck and listening to her sleeping respiration, but he himself could not sleep. Or perhaps he dozed, for the light had changed when he finally disengaged himself and rose from the bed. In the crib on the opposite side of the room Paul lay on his back, snoring delicately, his lips slackly apart. The doctor watched him for a moment, then dressed quietly and went out onto the gallery, carrying his boots.

Toussaint sat alone at the round table abstractly looking out over the rail, one hand on the knee of his uniform trousers and the other curled near a tall, clear glass of water. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead, in the creases below his yellow headcloth. He made no movement to wipe them away, nor did he turn to greet the doctor, who hesitated at the table’s edge, but with a motion of his hand invited him to sit. Seated, the doctor looked over the pool he had engineered with a certain satisfaction. There was no sound except for the purling of the water and the cackling of a crow on the eaves of the
grand’case.
Toussaint turned to him with a faint smile and was apparently about to speak, but just then his younger brother Jean-Pierre came dashing up the steps, calling out that Moyse and Charles Belair had been arrested on the order of Jean-François and that they and perhaps some other junior officers were being held under guard at Camp Barade.

Toussaint was on his feet immediately, his fingers brushing his sword hilt and then the grip of his pistol. He called for his coach, which came so quickly that the doctor thought that the horses must already have been harnessed and waiting. Toussaint did not often travel in the coach presented to him by the Spaniards, but on occasions when his progress and arrival required a degree of pomp and circumstance, he did sometimes use it.

Now he beckoned to the doctor to get into the coach with him. There was room enough for four but there were only the two of them, so they sat diagonally opposite each other, their knees knocked together with the jolts of the rough road. Jean-Pierre sat with the driver on the box. Flanked by five outriders, they rolled out from Habitation Thibodet.

Saint Domingue was a wretched country to travel by carriage. Before the insurrection, most colonists unfit for horseback riding had used sedan chairs borne by slaves, rather than risking their bones in wheeled vehicles. The doctor himself much preferred to ride and so, he knew, did Toussaint Louverture. But Toussaint had himself been a coachman, in former times when he was a slave, and so he knew which ways were passable, and how to traverse bad patches of the trails that would have been impassable to others.

The roads were rough and their pace was brisk; the bumps made the structure of the coach creak and groan and sent both passengers flying from their seats. It was almost comical, but the doctor was not moved to laugh, for Toussaint was showing more obvious anger than he had ever known him to do . . . his whole face looked contorted with it. The doctor clung to the edge of the window to hold himself back from lurching into the black general. The coach kept heeling over on one wheel or another, and sometimes it seemed sure to capsize, but in fact they bogged down only once, in the muddy slough of a stream crossing. The outriders dismounted to heave them free, and Toussaint got down to supervise them tersely; in a matter of minutes, the coach was under way again.

Soon after they had climbed back into the coach, the leaves began to rise and lash together in the wind which was bringing the rain in over the mountains. The afternoon was darkening, but there was still sunlight, streaking down through the treetops; a bar of light lay across the lower half of Toussaint’s face. The coach yawed and rocked, and Toussaint’s expression contorted; he took off his general’s bicorne and dug his fingers into his scalp, under the headcloth, molding and massaging as if to assuage some terrible pain, or (the doctor had this peculiar thought) as if to root some alien presence out of his own head. The doctor had never seen him so. Toussaint’s eyes squeezed shut from the pressure of whatever he was undergoing. He rocked his head blindly against the sickening lurches of the coach.
“M’pa kab pasé kalfou
sa-a,”
he muttered, in a voice much unlike his own. I cannot pass that crossroad . . .

Inexplicably, Toussaint pulled off both his boots. He kicked open the door with his bare heel and was gone. The doctor had barely time to register this departure before the coach heeled over in the other direction and the door slapped shut of its own accord.

Toussaint’s plumed hat swayed on a hook above the leather cushion where his head had lately rested. His empty boots bounced against each other on the floor. If not for these traces, the doctor might have doubted he had ever been there.
M’pa kab pasé kalfou sa-a . . .
The doctor closed his eyes and pressed the lids with his fingertips. The thousands of crossroads all over this land seemed to spread against his darkened eyes like glowing nodes of a golden net. At what
kalfou
was he standing now? and at which
kalfou
was Toussaint? and at which stood his friend, Captain Maillart? or Nanon and Paul, or his sister Elise? or the many men whose wounds and illnesses he had treated without knowing their names, or the other men who had in some fashion become his enemies . . . He knew that the net of
kalfous
connected him somehow to all of these, but he could not read the meaning of the connections. There was a muted thump of thunder, and the doctor opened his eyes and shook his head, dizzily, then peered out the window of the coach. Just here, the trail to Camp Barade crossed a somewhat wider road that ran from Marmelade in the interior down to Gonaives on the coast. The coach passed, one of the outriders clucked to his horse, and again they went under the deep shadows of the trees. The coach went into a tight turn and the doctor felt a cold clutch in his belly. He ran one hand along his belt and realized he was unarmed.

“Zombi!”
Jean-Pierre’s voice, from the box, chilled with fear. The doctor leaned forward, peering out. There was a man on the trail ahead of him, skeletally thin, his breechclout stiff with dirt. He walked in a rigid, unhuman way, arms glued against his ribs, his hips unyielding to his movement. His eyes were ringed clear around with white, and there was something in his face the doctor seemed to recognize. It seemed the horses would strike him down, for he walked toward them as if blind, but at the last possible moment he lurched from the trail and vanished in the brush.

The curve of the road grew tighter still, throwing the doctor up against the door of the coach—he dove out, it seemed to him later, almost before he had heard the first shot, cleared the trail edge and slid down a ravine face down, plowing up grasses and vines and loosening clumps of soft, wet earth. The side of his head butted into a boulder and he caught hold of the edge of it with one hand; the momentum of his fall twisted him onto his back. The spread-eagled form of one of Toussaint’s outriders appeared against the sky above him—shot from the saddle. The man landed in a huddle a yard away and the doctor crawled to him, but he was well beyond medical assistance. The doctor appropriated the dead man’s musket, which had not been fired, and weaseled his way back to the boulder, which offered cover as well as a prop for the barrel of the gun. Sighting up the ravine, he could see the overturned coach with one wheel still spinning, and some dozen black riders dressed in rags of Spanish uniform, circling, firing pistols into the coach or leaning down from their saddles to slash victims on the ground with their long knives. The doctor closed his left eye and shot one of them in the hollow between his bare shoulder blades—the man stretched out his arms and pitched down from his horse without making a sound, but the next man to him cried out in alarm and stared down the ravine across the mane of his rearing horse.

The doctor hunched further down behind the stone, tasting dirt at the corner of his mouth. Too late he thought of the cartridge box still attached to the dead outrider’s belt—he’d have to expose himself to reach it now. But none of the ambushers seemed disposed to return his fire. He heard someone call out an order, and voices shouting in confused reply, then hooves galloping, as it seemed, back down the trail to Camp Barade.

He remained motionless, mashed into the dirt, for a time he could not measure. His ear was swollen where it had struck on the stone, and his head pounded on the same side. Thunder clapped again, but still the rain did not begin. Blood from the body of the man lying near him puddled and trickled across the leaves, and a white butterfly landed there; the doctor was near enough to observe the butterfly’s proboscis dip to draw a taste of that thick red nectar. When the birds began to speak again, he raised his head enough to brush the dirt from his cheek. He rubbed grit from his teeth with a finger, spat, then crawled over to retrieve the cartridge box. There was no evidence he had been observed by anyone. He rose to one knee to reload the musket, then stood and scrambled, with the help of his free hand, back up to the trail.