Master of the Crossroads (91 page)

With Moustique, Marie-Noelle, and Riau, the doctor walked into the Place Clugny. At first light the square was nearly empty, though a few of the market women had already begun to appear, beginning to furnish their stalls. One tall and stately woman with a basket of soursops balanced on her head, another leading a donkey with panniers of green oranges . . . Marie-Noelle’s little son, called Jean-Baptiste, came trotting along behind the others. The dawn breeze coming from the sea ruffled the leaves of the
figuiers
planted round the edges of the square.

Moustique stopped, to the left of the central fountain, and handed Jean-Baptiste the gourd of water he had carried from the
hunfor.

“Alé,”
he said.

The boy looked up at him, quizzical. He had a sweet, milk-chocolate colored face. His stomach protruded slightly under his shirt.

Moustique nodded. The boy moved in a leftward circle, pouring out the water till the gourd was empty and a damp ring in the dust had closed upon itself. He looked up, smiling, dangling the gourd.

“Poukisa n’ap fé konsa?”
he said. Why do we do like this?

The doctor felt the quiet of attention of the market women who had continued to drift into the square while the child performed this small ceremony of remembrance. He did not look at them, but he felt their eyes.

“For the spirit of your grandfather,” Moustique said. “He was killed here by the
blancs,
right on this spot.”

“But my grandfather was a
blanc.
”

Moustique’s face screwed up, then relaxed and cleared. “It is so,” he said, going down on one knee beside the boy. “Still the other
blancs
killed him. He was a priest of God, an innocent man, and a martyr.”

“The blood is of the martyrs,” said Jean-Baptiste, in the recitative voice of catechism.

“It is so,” said Moustique, “but water is greater. Greater than either blood or wine.” He touched the child on his head, and stood up.

“Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine,”
Jean-Baptiste said.

“Yes,” said Moustique, with some difficulty, as another contortion ran over his face. “Love is stronger than hate.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “he has learned a great deal since he came into your care.” He glanced from Moustique to Marie-Noelle, who stood with her legs set slightly apart, rooted. A beautiful girl, with large clear eyes. She was pregnant again, and it became her.

The doctor lowered his eyes and looked at the ring of water sinking into the dust. Moustique had told him how such an offering of water might raise a spirit from its resting place. And at this moment he did feel the presence of the Père Bonne-chance, a sort of hum between the tendons at the back of his neck. A short, burly, balding man, with a smile that split his bullet head from one ear to the other. He had been a worldly man, excessively so for a priest (though the priests of Saint Domingue were quite an irregular lot). If one judged by his death, which had been slow and gruesome, he had hardly lived up to his name for good luck, and yet in his worldliness he had done, in small, barely noticeable increments, considerable good. In his worldliness, he would certainly have appreciated the woman who had captured his son’s fancy.
Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine,
indeed.

The moment had passed. Marie-Noelle twitched out a basket from behind her hip and ducked her head, with a smile. Taking Jean-Baptiste by the hand, she went off to do her marketing.

With Riau and Moustique, the doctor went out riding. The mission was to gather herbs, but they took a desultory way. For once there was no need for special caution—all was calm in all directions—and in any case both he and Riau carried their customary weapons, though they were not needed. Around noon, they swam in a spring-fed pool, and afterward ate the cold yams from their saddlebags with unusual relish.

Once they had eaten, Moustique seemed of a mind to turn back. But Riau lured them on ahead.
Pi devan,
he kept saying. A little farther . . . In fact there were attractions he seemed to have known in advance. Here a quantity of
herbe à crabe,
a specific against diarrhea, there a stand of
belle de nuit,
useful as a poultice to reduce the swelling of sprains. At last he brought them to a damp, shaded glen full of wild mushrooms enough to feed all the guests at the Cigny house and most of Moustique’s
lakou.

With their saddlebags bulging, they rode on, down the slopes of Morne Rouge, with the afternoon sunlight beginning to slant between the heavy, dark boles of the trees. Riau pulled his horse up before a great
mapou
tree, contemplated it for a long moment, then dismounted. From somewhere on his person he produced a whole egg, which he placed softly in a wooden bowl which lay before the mazy opening of the tree’s branching roots. He walked on, leading his horse into the clearing.

It was an unremarkable spot, a wide space of packed earth, with a painted post driven in near the center. The doctor had learned enough of such matters to recognize a
hûnfor,
but that was not enough to explain the prickling he felt at the back of his neck—a stirring, collapsing sensation in the hollow just at the base of his skull. But it was Moustique, who also seemed somewhat out of equilibrium, who put the question.

“What is this place?”

“Bois Cayman,” Riau said. He stood by his horse, with a casual air, not far from the
poteau mitan.
The doctor looked at the ground more closely. The dirt had been pounded smooth by many feet, but why did he feel this had happened quite recently? There were patches of sticky, cakey stain near the center post, some shards of broken clay vessels, and a scattering of black bristles.

“Bois Cayman,” Moustique said in a shivering tone. “Why have we come here?”

Riau inclined his head, politely. “You brought me to see your son pour water,” he said. “Sometimes, too, I serve in your mother’s house on the hill, so in my turn I have brought you here, where Ogûn spoke through the mouth of Boukman, to inspire our first rising.”

The tingling at the base of his head was a compound of fear and attraction—a mixture the doctor knew very well. He spoke without knowing he would do so. “Here is where the massacre of the white people was planned.”

“No.” Riau’s voice was sharp enough to echo, but from what? There was no barrier anywhere to produce the ricochet.

“It is here that the spirits joined us to make one people,” Riau said. “All we who are children of Guinée, and showed us how we must take our freedom.”

The doctor stopped himself from replying. He saw that from Riau’s point of view the slaying of a few hundred whites had been no more than a minor side-effect of the movement over the road toward liberty . . . as perhaps the destruction of thousands of Africans was only an unpleasant by-product of the manufacture of sugar. But that was another way of looking at it. His sense of disorientation increased.

“Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine,”
Riau said, looking over his shoulder and all around. “There is a spirit who walks with you too.” He was speaking directly to the doctor. “Balendjo, the traveler. Even now, he is near.”

“But all this was long ago,” the doctor said. “In ninety-one.” His lips felt thick and awkward. He was speaking in spite of his sense that what Riau described was going on invisibly around him even now.

“They come here every year, I think,” Moustique was saying. “August, at the middle of the month, so it has been, perhaps, six weeks?”

“No,” said Riau, gathering in the space around him with an encirclement of both hands. His horse stirred its head at this movement, jingling the rings of the bit.

“It is now,” Riau said. “Still, and always.”

The doctor glanced at Moustique and saw that he was only feigning comprehension.

“Our dead do not leave us,” Riau said. “They do not go away into the sky like spirits of dead
blancs.
”

At this Moustique nodded, for they both knew this litany.

“They are with us here, although invisible,
les Morts et les Mystères,
” Riau said. He drew his sword and pierced the ground with its point. “They have their home beneath the surface of the earth—they are waiting beyond the gate, on the opposite side of the crossroads.”

The doctor, who knew some portion of this reasoning from his conversations with Moustique, felt the small hairs rising on his forearms nonetheless. Moustique went on nodding rhythmically in the flow of Riau’s words.

“At dawn or sunset, when the light makes the sea a mirror,” Riau said, “then they are very near,
les Invisibles,
beneath the surface of the waters.” He withdrew his sword from the ground and brushed the crust of dirt from its point. “When they come through the crossroads, then they move us,” Riau said, looking very pointedly at the doctor. “That is how it is at Bois Cayman. And we must move as we are moved.”

The doctor saw that Moustique had stopped nodding; the boy understood this last remark no better than he did himself. But Riau seemed satisfied, or finished, anyway. He turned, leading his horse after him out of the clearing. Under the trees again, he vaulted into the saddle, and took them on a spiraling route back home.

I, Riau, I did not know why I brought them to Bois Cayman at first, or even that I meant to do it. It was first one leaf, and then the other, the mushrooms, then we had arrived. Afterward I saw that I had wanted them to know, but especially the doctor, what was going to happen, what was happening already even then. I, Riau, had served at Bois Cayman once more this year, and with my spirit in my head. Six weeks before as Moustique had said, but that meant nothing. Time was nothing in that place. If Riau had brought his watch, it would have stopped ticking there, but I did not bring it. They did not understand what it all meant, but I was not sorry for bringing them there. I took them in and out again by such a twisted way that neither could have found the place again, alone.

At that time the division between Moyse and Toussaint was always growing greater. Moyse was made captain of the plantations in all the north, but he would not drive the men of the hoe to work as Dessalines did in the south and the west. Dessalines would drive, Dessalines would whip, Dessalines would kill any man who rebelled, and sometimes with torture equal to what the worst
blanc
could have dreamed. Dessalines had tasted it all in his own flesh, or much of it, and it seemed that he was willing to give it all back, and that he did not care in what direction he would give it. It began to be said that ten men who awaited an inspection from Dessalines could do the work of thirty under slavery.

Moyse looked at all this and said,
My old uncle can do what he wants,
but I will not be the executioner of my people.

By then, some people had begun to believe that Moyse really was Toussaint’s nephew, because Toussaint was always so easy with him. Maybe Moyse believed it himself. But in truth, Toussaint was Moyse’s
parrain
as he was mine, from our days at Bréda, and Toussaint had no blood tie with Moyse, any more than with Riau.

Moyse did not want to drive the men of the hoe to work, even on the lands which he now owned. He gave those lands to some whitemen to manage, and took a part of the money and did nothing more. Toussaint was very angry at this, and he let Moyse feel his anger. As captain of plantations in the north, Moyse ought to be managing his own land and making an example of how to squeeze more and more work from the men of the hoe, as Dessalines was doing in all the other parts of the country. Toussaint made his anger known, but Moyse was not in the humor to take that warning.

Moyse did not get much credit from the
blancs
for being captain-general of the north. He liked the
blancs
even less than they liked him, but still when he came to Le Cap he noticed how the
blancs
all preferred Christophe, who was commandant of the town at that time and had a more pleasant manner with white people. That was because Christophe had been a waiter in a
blanc
hotel, during slavery time, although I don’t know how many white people understood this.

Moyse was not happy about Toussaint’s Constitution. He heard what was in that paper from Riau, before it was printed and taken to France by Vincent, and after it was printed, the paper went on stinging him. This Constitution was a hard rule for the men of the hoe, because it bound them to stay working on the plantations for all of their lives under the hands of the army. The paper also said that Toussaint had power to bring more men into the country to work with the hoe, which meant that he would buy them as slaves. When they came here they must be made free, but it began to look like a strange kind of freedom.

From Toussaint’s councils I knew that he did not really mean to put those new people into the fields. That part of the paper was meant to fool the
blancs
in France. What Toussaint planned was to bring in twenty thousand new men and put them into the army, to replace all the men who had been killed by the war in the south, because he was afraid a new army would come against us out of France, or maybe he already knew this was going to happen. Still, it meant that he would be paying to steal more people out of Guinée, as Riau and many others had been stolen.

Moyse was at Bois Cayman that year, and Joseph Flaville, and other officers of the army of the north, though not all of them. Toussaint did not know that they had gone there. Toussaint was not in the spirit of Bois Cayman anymore, or he did not seem to be.

I did not know what I would do when the thing began. At that time I had much freedom to move around the north with my horse soldiers. Even though Captain Riau was under command of higher officers, with the favor of Toussaint and the friendship of Moyse, I could often choose where I would be, sometimes at Ennery, or Dondon, or Le Cap.

Until the last day I thought that maybe I would take off my uniform coat and draw out my
coutelas
and begin killing whitemen again like before. Moyse expected this of Riau, and of Flaville also. That last day, I still did not know for certain, until we had passed Limbé, where Flaville commanded. There my heart turned cold and shrunken, and I knew my spirit was going to move me in another direction from Moyse.