All souls rising, p.36
All Souls' Rising, page 36
“Be still, man,” the doctor said, as the wounded man grunted and flexed his bloody toes. “It’s not so bad. You won’t lose the leg.” The doctor was cheerful saying this, confident that the promise would come true. He had learned enough of herbal medicine to be sure enough that he could keep off gangrene.
“All the time I tell him to be still,” the hurt man said, sighting down the bare length of his leg. “But he keep moving.”
Marotte slapped him on the muscle of his thigh, and hunkered down to fasten her hands on the shin just below the knee, giving Paulette a wink as she took her position. The doctor stooped and dug again, spreading the pliers’ jaws slightly within the wound. The broken butt of the bamboo shifted from him, and the injured man gasped and twisted his head, but Marotte and Paulette held him fast between them. The stub slipped within the pliers’ mouth and the doctor felt that he had caught it. He groped a little farther toward the point, grasped and pulled back with a smooth, steady pressure. The sliver resisted, gave a little, and plopped free in his hand. The patient’s breath hissed out and, as if with the same exhalation, a quantity of blood flowed from his foot, spilling onto the doctor’s fingers. With his free hand he flexed the corners of the foot. The blood looked clean. A centipede was walking off the edge of the straw paillasse, jointed and metallic; the doctor couldn’t see its feet. He straightened up, waving the two-inch bamboo splinter over his patient’s head.
“You see?—No barb.” He waggled the splinter between the teeth of the pliers. “You are lucky. And not poisoned either, I don’t think.”
The hurt man’s eyes had slid half closed, but they suddenly started open again, as Marotte thrust his foot into a kettle of disinfectant brew that had just come off the fire. He twisted to one side and tried to raise his knee.
“Leave it,” the doctor said. “Let it work, it will draw the corruption.” The hurt man breathed out whistlingly through his teeth, and relaxed enough to let Marotte bring his foot back into the hot water. The doctor turned and flicked the splinter away, spinning it past a live thorn-studded sapling that Riau had incorporated into the roof’s support. He wiped the pliers on his pants leg and walked down to the fire to wash his hands. In a moment, Père Bonne-chance had joined him.
“Success?” the priest said. The rosary was still looped over his hands and he inattentively continued to shift the beads under his thumb.
“Je pense que oui…” the doctor said. “She’s a very useful person, your daughter.” He had come to the point that he could allude to the priest’s children without any particular self-consciousness.
“She might owe you a lifetime of usefulness,” the priest said, inclining his head. Doctor Hébert reddened slightly and looked away.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “And yours?”
“That one has died,” said Père Bonne-chance. Drying his hands on a shock of grass, the doctor turned to face him.
“Are you certain? Come then, let’s go look at her.”
They reentered the hospital ajoupa, and the priest led the doctor to the pallet where the dead girl lay. The doctor knelt, felt for a pulse, held a finger underneath her nostrils, but a glance would have sufficed to confirm the priest’s diagnosis. The girl was ten or twelve years old, or had been. She lay on her back with her mouth slightly open, the white of her teeth and her eye whites exposed. The velvety black of her skin was turning gray. Her arms and legs were so emaciated that the knobs of her joints looked painfully swollen, and the gaseous balloon of her belly puffed out between the sharp blades of her rib cage.
“Starvation,” the priest muttered.
“Yes, or worms, possibly.” A fly circled the dead child’s head and the doctor fanned it away before it could light. He stood up. Down-hill, a plunking of sour-sweet notes began; it was Riau, playing an instrument he had lately made for himself, which he called a banza. Another fly swooped toward the dead girl, but this one was a dragonfly, and it whirred past without stopping. The doctor followed it out, stooping a little to pass under the fringed eave of the ajoupa. Beyond it, several dragonflies were circling each other in a green and sunstreaked glade.
From here he could look down to see Riau, who sat just outside the ajoupa where they slept at night, cradling the banza in his crossed legs. The instrument was made of a planed length of mahogany attached to half of a large round calabash over which had been stretched a drumhead of sheepskin parchment. There were three strings, twirled out of the guts of an agouti Riau had killed. The doctor admired the ingenuity of the whole production, though the music the thing could make grated on his nerves, tending to produce melancholy. He raised his eyes toward the horizon, where the lush green of mountains blued in the distance, the plain a scorched gap passing in between them.
“They’ve been a long time gone,” the priest said, as he came out, echoing the doctor’s thought. He was referring to the pair of mulattoes, Raynal and Deprés, who had gone to present the peace proposal so carefully drafted and signed by Toussaint and the others to the Colonial Assembly in Le Cap some days before.
“I wonder…” the doctor said, trailing off. The child Merbillay and Riau called Caco came out of the ajoupa and began turning bowlegged circles to the notes of the banza. Riau beat out a rhythm with the heel of his hand on the skin head as he plucked.
“If it goes well?” the priest said.
“How could it not?” the doctor said. “We—they ask so little. Four hundred manumissions, to bring all the rest of them back to the fields?”
“If they can bring them,” the priest said softly.
“They’re starving,” the doctor said. “I’d think many of them would gladly come in.” He moved toward a twig where a dragonfly had lit, its opalescent wings shimmering in the uneven light. The insect flew, and he turned back toward the priest, who’d seemed to shrivel in his brown robes over the weeks. The doctor felt the boniness of his own face and hands. They’d all become familiar with short commons. These great encampments laid waste to the land like a plague of grasshoppers or locusts.
“It would be madness for the assembly to refuse,” the doctor said.
“Yes…there is madness enough to go round, I think.” From the hollows of his sinking eyes, the priest held his gaze. “Well, but it is an unpleasant thing.”
The doctor looked down through the trees, toward where Riau played the banza and his son danced around him in slow circles. “What do you mean?” he said.
“Betrayal,” said the priest. “These hundred thousand given up to buy the freedom of their leaders.”
“Do you see it so?” The doctor stooped and picked up a bright seed of a bead tree and began scraping the mud from it with his thumbnail.
“What’s your opinion?” asked the priest.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said truthfully. “It isn’t at all clear to me.”
“Now that’s a feeling I have shared,” the priest said, and gave his unaffected smile. He let the rosary drop to his waist and began making his way down the slope, holding to the thorny saplings to preserve his balance.
The doctor watched him out of sight. He’d felt no guilt, in fact, in helping to work up the compromise, for after all he’d made no promise that could be betrayed, and yet he was uneasy in his mind. Here in this place, he came and went much as he would—seemed free without truly being so. The prospect of real freedom had unbalanced him. His bones seemed to ache for it, but he was also more afraid than he had been in quite some time.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT AFTERNOON, the doctor retreated into the shade of the sleeping ajoupa, and dozed off there without quite meaning to. Strangely, he dreamed of being cold, of wandering in a featureless, snow-covered landscape like nothing he’d ever known in his waking life. From behind the icy crest of a ridge, a huge howling rose to the violet sky. Wolves. He woke then, sweating and confused. He could still hear that howling—it was still going on.
Nine or ten blacks, all strangers to him, came bursting into the ajoupa. The doctor got up onto one knee and was jerked forward, out of the shelter. He saw that the priest was similarly chivvied out, his harriers pricking at him with swords’ points. They were sweeping through the hospital as well and flushing out such whites as lay there ill or injured. Fontelle had collected all of her children that were at hand and was shepherding them uphill into the bush. She looked back at the priest but he could not see her. Someone had hit him in the face and blood was running into his eyes.
A couple of musket shots sounded, random, people firing at the sky. Conchs were whistling here and there, their shrills punctuating the deep, throbbing ululation that seemed to blend into a single voice, like a low chord on an organ. The doctor was running willy-nilly down the slope, branches lashing across his face. They menaced him with cutlasses from right and left, and someone directly behind him kept slamming him across the shoulders and the lower back with something that felt like either a tree limb or a plank, blows so powerful he could scarce keep his feet. The whites were being herded in from all directions, toward the clearing within the grove where the white women slept; they were all screaming and weeping now. The blacks pressed on them from every side, cursing them and howling. Among the white men there was a half-organized effort to link arms to shelter the women in the center but there were not enough of them to close a circle.
Doctor Hébert locked elbows with the priest and stood breathing shallowly against the bruises on his back. Behind, a woman’s voice kept plaintively calling something indistinct. In the moil of shrieking black faces turned against them the doctor could make out no single individual he knew.
Then an avenue opened in the mob and at its farther end Biassou appeared. The blacks nearest him quieted a little, so that the doctor hoped for some return to order, some revelation of the logic of the situation, if any there was. But Biassou raised both his hands above his head, one holding a short knife whetted to a silver gleam, and cut shallowly across his other palm and waved the hand to show the blood around. A froth was sizzling at the corners of his mouth; he was transfigured. “Kill the white men!” he was shouting. “Kill the women. Kill them all.”
Behind them, within the circle of linked arms, some of the women renewed their screaming. Among the blacks, there seemed a total willingness to carry out Biassou’s suggestion on the spot, but before the butchery could begin, Toussaint appeared at the head of a troop of the best-disciplined men, all of them carrying new Spanish muskets. They cut between the prisoners and the mob and quickly formed into a line.
Toussaint was standing directly in front of the doctor, his gray pigtail twisted over the greasy collar of his old livery coat, green fabric stretched taut across his shoulders with the browned old bloodstains scattering over it like the map of some undiscovered archipelago. Toussaint spread his hands high, palm-down over the crowd that faced him. He made a number of smoothing motions, like a woman smoothing dough across a bread board. The people nearest him lowered their knives and began to listen with a sulky attention. Even Biassou was silent. The doctor had not heard what he had said.
Toussaint turned around to face the white people. “Kneel down,” he shouted. “All of you down on your knees.” The doctor wanted very badly to connect with Toussaint’s eyes, but they shot over his shoulder, even as Toussaint switched his leg and hooked the doctor’s feet from under him so that he dropped deadweight onto the ground. Then all the white men began loosing their arms and kneeling. The doctor bowed his head and looked at the scuffed dirt; he felt as if he were waiting for the fall of an executioner’s ax.
“Put them in irons,” Toussaint shouted out. The doctor squinted up at him sidelong. The kerchief that covered his head was dark with sweat, his face was twisted, his eyes were shriveled away in their sockets. He was still shouting, something unintelligible, as if his rage was one with Biassou’s. A cart pulled up, drawn by a donkey; Riau and another man walked alongside it. The bed of it was piled high with rusting old slave shackles. Toussaint dropped his fisted hand, or let it fall. The whole crowd sagged accordingly. In the quiet that followed they could hear the birdcalls and the chink of the chains as Riau began tossing them down out of the wagon onto the ground.
The blood mood was broken, and the mob had begun to dissolve and drift away. There was the ringing sound of Riau pounding rivets into the irons with a blacksmith’s hammer as he made his way around the circle of white men. The doctor sat on his heels, waiting his turn. He was watching Biassou, who stood in slack confusion, the sacrificial moment snatched from under him. Toussaint approached him, braced his arms on Biassou’s shoulders. They spoke for a moment, too low to be overheard, then Biassou broke away and stalked off through the trees.
It grew calm enough for Doctor Hébert to turn to the priest and briefly examine the cut above his eye, more superficial than he would have supposed from the amount that it had bled. “You’re a free bleeder,” the doctor began to say, with an attempt at half a smile, but one of Toussaint’s guards chopped a musket barrel down on his wrists, knocking his hands away from the priest’s face and, grunting in a low harsh voice, warned him not to speak.
How automatically one thought of them as Toussaint’s guards…The doctor knelt rigidly like a man at prayer, numbly obedient, looking at nothing but the trampled ground between his knees, until Riau came to him. He was a long time selecting a set of irons, which he fit loosely over the cracked rotting uppers of the doctor’s boots. After he had driven in the rivets, he ran his finger around inside the shackles and gave the doctor a look of some significance which the doctor could not fathom. Riau reached out and squeezed the muscle of his shoulder, giving him a little shake, then his eyes went blank and he passed to the next man.
Still the doctor was facing forward, his feet sticking straight out before him now. Toussaint had remained at the edge of the trees, after Biassou’s departure, and now the doctor saw him take his headcloth off and wring it out slowly, hand over hand to the sweat-dripping corners. He shook the kerchief out into a square and let it billow in the breeze, then tied it carefully around his head again before he left the clearing.
Twilight came down, cool, gray and cloudy. Two big green parrots flew from tree to tree. Toussaint’s guards still loosely enclosed the prisoners, less to keep them in than to protect them from a fresh assault, the doctor surmised. They were free to move about within the circle if they chose. Only the men had been put in chains, the women and children left as they were.
The doctor got up and shuffled to the edge of the ring. When a guard noticed him, he gestured at his breeches; the guard nodded and waved him toward the tree line. There he unbuttoned and relieved himself with a painful difficulty. His urine was bloody from the blows his kidneys had received.
He closed his trousers and shuffled back, crossing the center of the circle. The chain on his shackles shortened his step, but he was more discommoded by the simple weight of the iron. He came upon the erstwhile procurator of Vallière crouched among some of the other men and a few of the older women. His teeth were almost chattering from agitation as he spoke in a low urgent whisper. The doctor squatted down among them. “What has happened, do you know?”
“The lunatics at the Assembly rejected the proposal.” The procurator sprayed his face with a nervous spittle as he spoke. “Would not even have it read or hear it. Would not treat with them at all till every man surrendered, in advance.”
The doctor’s heart bulged and contracted. He must have known this, he felt now, from the moment that he woke that afternoon, but it was still a shock to hear it.
“O mon Christ,” the doctor said. “It is madness, truly.”
“And the commissioners?” someone said.
“What about them?” the procurator said in a breaking voice. “What can they do? C’est foutu et c’est tout. Do you understand that? We are already dead.”
A woman moaned and mashed her face into her tattered sleeve. The doctor stood up in his shackles, his sudden movement dizzying him. The inner walls of his mouth had gone as dry and rough as sandpaper. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, but instead of a blanket of comforting darkness he seemed to see that tree so redly flowering, tonguelike stamens lolling from the blooms as if they’d lick the raw flesh of the white man who’d been skinned alive there. What difference was there, under the skin? He’d believed Toussaint had saved them, but probably it would have been better if they’d all been shot at once. He took a step and then another, the bare pressure of his shinbones against the bands of iron. He kept on going among the others with that same shuffling gait of any other member of the walking dead.
I, RIAU, WHEN I CHAINED THOSE WHITEMEN, I nailed the chains as tightly as they would have done on me. But with the doctor, I put the irons outside his boots, and loosely too. In the dark, if he had taken off the boots, he might have twisted his heels out of the irons, I set them loose enough for that. But he did not understand it, though I shook him by his shoulder to try to make him see. I did the same for the little fat father also (he was not so fat anymore by that time) and I saw by his eyes that he knew what I was doing, but I saw too he would not run away.
I did so because I didn’t want those two to have to die then, even if I would have been happy to have killed the others all myself—all the whitemen and whitewomen who were there. It was not that they were kind, the doctor and the priest, because the kindness of whitemen is so shallow it does not even go so deep as their thin skins. But because I had helped them as much as they helped me, building them a shelter and hunting food for us to eat, and we had eaten and slept all together like brothers, and with our women and the children in the one ajoupa. I wanted to save them because they were mine. But neither one of them knew how to live in the bush alone, and if they had run away they would have been caught and shot, surely, that night or the next day. So it was useless, what I had done. That was a word Toussaint put into my head, useless. But it happened that they did live longer, at least for a little while.
