Master of the Crossroads (20 page)

Maillart and Clervaux came riding up on the other side of Bel Argent. “For the love of—” Maillart began, while Clervaux talked through him,
“Attention, parrain, au blessé . . .”
From a further distance, the mulatto officer called Blanc Cassenave watched with a hooded expression. Another volley of grapeshot flared out, and all the horses laid back their ears and scrambled. The doctor fell in the white alkali dust, finding himself eye to eye with Guiaou for an instant, then rolled to avoid lashing hooves and came up onto his feet. Maillart had drawn his rifle from the scabbard and was thrusting it toward him, at the same time jerking his jaw across the river. The doctor took the weapon and while Guiaou calmed his horse he steadied the octagon barrel across the animal’s back and drew his aim on one of the British cannoniers. Blowback from the priming pan stung his cheek when he squeezed the trigger, and kept him from seeing if he had hit his mark, but the British cannon did go silent for a moment, and in the window of quiet the doctor called out to Toussaint.

“You
must
allow me to treat your wound.”

Toussaint shook his head, showing the tips of his teeth. If he felt any pain, he did not show it. The doctor wondered about his loss of blood. Maillart shouted, half in anger, “Do you think you can win the whole war in one day?”

“Mais oui, mon cher—si Dyé vlé, n’ap fé sa.”
Toussaint smiled as easily as if he were sitting on the gallery of the house at Habitation Thibodet. We may do that, if God so wills.

He reached down to stroke the quivering neck of his horse, then rode down the line to attend to the deployment of the captured cannon which had just been dragged across the desert from the north.

For two hours more, and well past sunset, Toussaint kept in the saddle at the head of his men. He was only persuaded to attend to his wound when darkness had completely stopped the fighting. Even then it took the doctor much persuasion to get Toussaint to return to Gonaives, where he had left his herbs and poultices, and where there would perhaps be a proper bed.

Leaving Blanc Cassenave in command at Pont d’Ester, they rode back in the darkness, a small party, across the Savane Désolée. The sky above them was perfectly clear and in the starlight the cacti cast shadows across the weird white glow of the salt flats. Packs of wild dogs had come out of the desert to growl and quarrel over the carcasses of the slain Britishers, their backs humped up and their jaws thrusting. Whenever the breeze from the west died down, the blood smell was heavy and rank all around them. Toussaint, who had brushed away every offer of assistance, rode fluidly upright in the saddle. Doctor Hébert had noticed some time earlier that his bleeding had stopped or slowed to an imperceptible rate. Perhaps the man had authority to command his own circulation.

Dismounting in the courtyard of the Gonaives
casernes,
Toussaint showed his first sign of weakness; the injured leg would not take his weight. He buckled sideways and was caught by Quamba, who had come up to hold the horse. The doctor took him under the other arm and they made their way across a doorsill to a cot. When Toussaint was once seated, the doctor tried to swing his feet up to the horizontal, but Toussaint brushed his hands away and demanded that his portable writing desk be fetched instead.

“My report,” he said. “You will write for me.”

“Are you mad?” the doctor asked him.

“Not in the least,” Toussaint snapped. “The report must come first, and after . . . as you wish.” He stroked a fingertip across the shredded fabric partly covering his wound.

The doctor dragged the fingers of both hands backward over his head, raking up the ring of hair surrounding his bald dome. He went to the door and called for Maillart, who wrote a reasonably legible hand.

“Dictate to him,” he said to Toussaint, “but let me examine you at least—I will copy the letter over, afterward, if need be.”

Someone brought wine but Toussaint refused it—rare commodity that it was—and took only a few sips of water. After drinking he let himself be eased back on a horsehair cushion. Guiaou was lighting several small string-wicked lamps made from lard congealed in clay jars.

“Write what I say,” Toussaint said.
“Toussaint Louverture, général de
l’armée de l’Ouest, à Etienne Laveaux, général par interim . . .”

Maillart’s pen began to scratch. The woman Merbillay came into the room carrying a pot of boiled water and some strips of clean rag. Guiaou pulled off Toussaint’s boot and went to the door to empty the blood onto the ground outside. The doctor took up a short knife and slit Toussaint’s trouser leg to the knee. He cleaned the knife with the hot water, then began using the point to pick shreds of cloth from the edges of the wound. Toussaint’s left hand clenched on the canvas of the cot, but his voice went on without faltering.

“It is true, general, that I have been led into error by the enemies of the
Republic, but what man can boast to have avoided every trap set by the
wicked? In truth, I did fall into their webs, but not for absolutely no reason.
You should very well remember that, before the disasters at Le Cap, and by
the steps I had taken in your direction, my only goal was to unite our forces
to combat the enemies of France.”

The steady rhythm of the voice inspired the doctor with a feeling of great calm, so accustomed was he to taking Toussaint’s dictation himself. Maillart’s pen scraped against the paper, hesitated, scraped again. The whole room seemed mesmerically peaceful. The doctor took a wet cloth from Merbillay and pressed it to the wound to dissolve the crust of dried blood. Toussaint’s breath whistled, but he did not flinch. He went on speaking without a break—it was a royal revision of history he had begun, the doctor thought, or perhaps his intentions had always been as he now described them, for no one in his camp had ever plumbed the full depth of his thinking.

“Unfortunately for all concerned, the paths toward reconciliation which
I proposed—the recognition of the liberty of the blacks and a general
amnesty—were rejected. My heart bled, and I poured out tears for the
unhappy fate of my country, foreseeing the misfortunes which would follow. I was not deceived in that regard: fateful experience has proved the
reality of my predictions. Meanwhile, the Spaniards offered me their protection, and to support all those who would fight for the cause of kings,
and, having always fought for that liberty, I clung to their offers, seeing
myself abandoned by the French, my brothers.”

The doctor clicked his tongue, withdrawing the rag from the wound. The smoothness of this discourse was truly astonishing. He touched with a fingernail a bit of shrapnel embedded in the wound. Toussaint seemed to raise his voice slightly.

“But a somewhat belated experience opened my eyes to these perfidious
protectors and, having taken note of their scoundrel’s deceitfulness, I clearly
perceived that their intention was to make us slit each other’s throats so
that our numbers would be reduced, and to load our remnant with chains
and tumble us back into our former slavery. No, they will never arrive at
their infamous goal, and we will in our turn avenge ourselves on these
beings, who are contemptible in every respect. Let us unite forever, and,
forgetting the past, concern ourselves only, from now on, with avenging
ourselves in detail upon our perfidious neighbors.”

Well, this passage was plausible enough, despite the inflated language; it was certainly true that the Spanish commitment to liberating the slaves of Saint Domingue was insincere, and (even without the discoveries at Biassou’s camp) no one could have failed to notice that the Spanish part of the island had remained a slave state . . . The doctor flexed his left thumb and forefinger like a set of pincers. At his nod, Guiaou shifted two of the lamps a little nearer. Having lost his forceps in some accident of war, the doctor had grown out and filed the nails of those two digits to replace them. With this homemade instrument and the knife blade he began to dig out bits of the scrap metal from the British grape.

“It is absolutely certain that the national flag flies at Gonaives as well
as all the surrounding area, and that I have chased the Spanish and the
émigrés from the area of Gonaives, but my heart is shipwrecked by the
event which overtook some unfortunate whites who were victims in that
affair. I am not like so many others who can watch scenes of horror in cold
blood; I have always had humanity to share, and I groan whenever I cannot
prevent evil.”

Again the statement was more accurate in principle than in precise point of fact, the doctor reflected as he probed the wound—to be sure, Toussaint had himself ordered the execution of at least some of those “unfortunate whites” who had perished during the taking of Gonaives . . . but it was equally true that he disliked useless bloodshed and would not brook cruelty for its own sake from anyone in his command . . . otherwise the doctor himself might have been dead long ago.

Merbillay held up a battered tin pan. The doctor dislodged, slowly, a bullet fragment, what seemed to be a lady’s hairpin, the tongue of an iron belt buckle, and finally, with greater difficulty and greater care, a twisted, square cut iron nail. Guiaou’s concerned face leaned near Merbillay’s in the lard-colored lamplight. The metal shards dropped from the doctor’s fingernails and rang on the pan’s tin bottom. Toussaint interrupted himself.

“Kite’m oué sa,”
he said. Let me see.

Merbillay raised the pan under his chin. Toussaint hitched himself up with a grunt. He stirred the bits of metal with a blunt fingertip. Shaking his head, he picked up the hairpin, chuckled at it softly, then let it fall back into the pan and went on with his dictation.

At last the wound was clean. The doctor held a fresh rag over it to stanch the renewed bleeding, while Merbillay soaked herbs in hot water, then composed a compress. The doctor took the damp packet from her hands and bound it loosely to the wound with strips of cloth.

“Salut en patrie,”
Toussaint concluded. “I will sign it later.”

He turned partly on his side, facing toward the stone wall, and fell silent. Though he lay quite still and his breathing suggested sleep, his eyes were open, glittering darkly in the lamplight. Often enough the doctor had seen him rest in this reptilian fashion. Toussaint seemed to need no more than two or three hours of actual sleep each night, and the doctor knew that the letter would be recopied and perhaps redrafted before dawn.

At his rough-carpentered table in the fort at Port-de-Paix, Governor-General Laveaux pulled the edges of the paper tight, and bent his head close to the carefully inked lettering. From time to time he turned the paper over as if to reassure himself that it was a real dimensional object whose meaning was what it seemed to be.

Gonaives, Gros Morne, the cantons of Ennery, Plaisance, Marmelade, Dondon, Acul and all the surrounding area, including Limbé, are under my orders, and I have four thousand armed men disposed over all these places, not counting the citizens of Gros Morne, who number six hundred.

A miracle. Such a reversal of fortune could only be that. For the first time in many months, Laveaux had the power to march out of Port-de-Paix where he had been cornered for so long, the Spanish and English closing in on him like paired loops of a garrote—could ride freely across the quarter of Borgne, until lately under Spanish control, to rejoin Villatte at Le Cap. Toussaint, meanwhile, had made another lightning strike across the mountains of the Cordon de l’Ouest to scatter the forces of Jean-François (who had temporarily pushed Moyse back from Dondon) and driven them back across the Spanish frontier.

Laveaux rode across the northern plain, catching no glimpse of the maroons or bands of brigands who had so lately been burning and marauding all over that whole area. No one ventured to attack his short column and there was no sign of any disorder; on the contrary the women were working peaceably in their gardens, and on some of the sequestered plantations work gangs were beginning to set out new cane. Laveaux rode into Dondon to see the miracle worker, for the first time, with his own eyes.

Toussaint Louverture was waiting for him in the public square before the church. On horseback he made an imposing figure, but when he dismounted to approach Laveaux on foot, he seemed considerably diminished. His legs were a little bowed from riding and so short that the scabbard of his immense sword cut a furrow in the dirt behind him as he walked. A small, knotty man, with the build of a jockey, a long underslung jaw, and strange deep eyes under the yellow headcloth revealed when he swept off his hat. Laveaux swung down from his own horse to meet him.

“My general,” Toussaint said in a clear voice, not particularly loud. “I place the Army of the West under your orders.” He made a half-turn and gestured with his hat in a semicircle behind him. The troops were drawn up for review, mounted officers waiting before them, and the foot soldiers ranked in row upon neat row, then in orderly columns running back along the side streets, then in wider ranks again on the slope above the town, black men mostly barefoot and bare-chested, relaxed and holding their arms at the ready.

Laveaux felt the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck and on his forearms under the sleeves of his uniform coat. He returned Toussaint’s salute, and stood facing the black officer, a full head shorter than himself, eyes shining up from under the yellow headscarf. Laveaux felt an urge to embrace him, but held himself back. He shook Toussaint’s hand. Something more was called for. He took the tallest red plume from his own hat and set it in the center of the white feathers which ornamented Toussaint’s bicorne. Toussaint smiled, nodded, adjusted the bicorne carefully on his head. He turned to face his troops, drawing himself up. The red feather bobbed high above the white ones in his hat. There was the silence before thunder, and then four thousand men began to cheer.