All Souls' Rising (11 page)

“Leave us,” Claudine ordered. “
Maintenant
.” Isidor retreated and Claudine stood for a moment, catching her breath. Mouche was slumped against the wall, her cheek laid against the rough half-logs. There was a rip at the neck of her calico smock, perhaps from Arnaud’s greedy hand that morning. Claudine went to the tack room and came back with a riding crop, tan leather braided around whalebone. For a moment she hesitated, contemplative, as though she anticipated a touch of love. Her left hand closed on the tear at the girl’s neck, and she jerked it down, baring Mouche to the swell of her buttocks. Her back was dotted with marks of old beatings, maggoty white blotches on the dark skin, some encrusted with drying scab.

With a little strangled shriek Claudine lashed the riding crop across the patchy skin, and again on the backstroke she hit, and again. The inch-wide loop at the crop’s end raised an oval welt if she struck well, and still she felt it was insufficient, every time. Though Mouche gasped and pressed herself more nearly to the wall, the blows were not strong enough to
force
her; she was only shrinking from the sting, and Claudine wished she had the strength to manage a bullwhip, she wished she could flay the bitch to the bone. Anything to change the timbre of her insincere cries so they no longer would remind her of the self-same moaning Mouche had given up when she was covered by Arnaud. The crop could barely scratch the surface of Claudine’s deepest indignation and as Mouche arched her back and twisted her neck, uttering those unconvincing doglike yelps, their eyes met, and Claudine recalled in spite of her loathing how her parents had sold her to Arnaud for the money they believed he possessed, believing stupidly that all Creole planters were richer than Croesus, how whoever had sold Mouche from her home would have made a better bargain, receiving a few sticks of tobacco or an iron ax head in exchange for her life, something real to the touch and to use. Oh, the intolerable thought—the strokes of the crop must wear it away, but they would not, and still their eyes were locked. That crackling connection brought them to a communion larger than themselves; all over the island masters and slaves were expressing their relation in similar ways, and it was nothing to lop an ear or gouge an eye, even to cut off a hand, thrust a burning stake up a rectum, roast a slave in an oven alive, or roll one down a hill in a barrel studded with nails. All these were as sacraments, body and blood.

Panting and biting her lips in frustration, Claudine bent the whalebone double; when she released it, it hummed across the room like a dragonfly, rebounding from the wall. She made a cat-like swipe with her bare left hand, scoring the flesh with her nail points, and Mouche gave a shout of surprise at this, but still it was not all she wanted. Besides, she had torn her nail; it dangled from the finger where she wore her marriage ring. She bit it off, with a tingling taste of her own blood, while Mouche’s melting brown eye still watched her through a slit. Exhausted from the encounter, Mouche breathed on that same sighing pattern. Claudine thought that while her power over the girl was absolute, Mouche did not fully recognize this truth. Yet she would make her know it.

She picked up the crop and stalked back to the house, snapping the leather loop into her palm. The torn cuticle was stinging her…“Isidor,” she cried. “Open the storeroom.”

Isidor came shuffling, reluctant, shaking his bowed head, with Marotte hovering around him, wringing her long yellow hands. “Eh madame,” Isidor muttered, “Eh madame, the master told me—”

“Open it!” Claudine said. “You will take your orders from me.”

“Madame, he hasn’t the key,” Marotte said.

“
Liar!
” Claudine slapped her with all her force, enough to smash the mulattress’s face sideways. The shock of palm on cheek was sweet to her. Marotte had once been her husband’s fancy, before Mouche, before that other “lady’s maid” who finally had run away to the mountains, abandoning (of course) her string of half-breed children. Claudine inhaled, swelling her bosom against the sheathed razor. “The master is gone,” she said. “I
will
be obeyed. Do you hear me? Fetch a pry bar.”

She turned her back. In the big gilt-framed mirror that was the main room’s most significant ornament, she saw Isidor and Marotte, who still cupped her hand over her face, exchange a shivering look. Marotte went out to the gallery then, and Isidor left by the back door. She waited, confident now, for his return, and kept her back turned to him when he came. There was a clatter of metal on metal; Isidor grunted, and then came the tearing as the wood gave way around the lock.

Inside, the storeroom was dark and sweltering; it was the stomach of the house. It held all she had to hope for. A white woman could not run to the mountains, though Claudine did have her mad fantasies; she would have gone away with that ridiculous little doctor, even. Along with special tools, the room held a military musket and a fowling piece, powder and lead, a meager store of wine and the bottles of
eau-de-vie
which Arnaud tried to keep from her. She took one from the shelf and broached it. The liquid seemed quite tasteless in her mouth, though farther down she felt the burn. She stroked her fingers over the curving slats of a powder keg and sniffed the acrid tang of it. For some of her husband’s friends it was a sporting pastime to pack the anus of a wayward slave with gunpowder and blow it by a fuse,
faire sauter un nègre
, they called it, to make him jump.

Lolling against the rear shelves, she nursed from the long slim neck of the bottle. The white brandy was a spiritual essence, so infinitely superior to the crudely distilled rum she could usually obtain. The bottleneck seemed to curve into her hand, glimmering like starlight in the shadows; each time the rim met her lips it was like exchanging kisses with a swan. Each swallow was an inspiration; she could feel her feet levitating from the floor. Transported, she set the bottle uncorked on a shelf and wandered out into the midday blaze and heat, empty-handed, for she had dropped the crop somewhere, and had even forgotten about it.

Very likely she would not have returned to the shed then, if she had not heard Mouche singing. The voice was deeper, stronger, than the girl’s speaking tone, and the words came from the savage language of her birth, if there were words. Claudine could make out no divisions; it was a singular liquid sound, like a long wave rippling all the way back to Guinée. She hesitated on the threshold of the shed. Mouche had shimmied all the way out of her dress and was naked. Her swollen fingers bunched, like overripe fruit born of her bound hands. She sang to herself with her eyes closed, the crinkly puff of her matted hair rucked up against the wall. The voice came out of her essential African self, and Claudine recognized that after all she was still untouched in her identity; it was infuriating. Rage shimmered across her brain from pole to pole. After everything, still the girl did not know, but she would make her know.

Dizzily she stepped through the doorway into the shed, blinking with the change of light. The stitched edge of the razor’s sheath pinched a fold of her skin; she reached into her bodice and drew the blade out bare. Mouche sang on, unaware of her, until Claudine took her shoulder with a certain gentleness and turned her so her back was to the wall. Her eyes rolled open an instant before the voice ceased, as Claudine let the razor decline through a slow curve and come to rest against the point just below the sternum where the taut rise of the belly began.

Mouche’s throat worked, silently now, and Claudine saw her eyes widening and saw that she
had
understood, at last. She herself had no further intention, but to make her point, but when Mouche saw there was no limit, that truly nothing could stop her now, Claudine could no longer stop herself. Or possibly it was her hand or the blade itself on its own agency that was not stopped, because she had not, herself, intended anything more. Only Mouche’s body opened down the plumb line to her center and beyond, like a banana peel splitting down its seam. The blade furrowed through a whitish layer of fat; there was no blood, oddly, until the viscera slithered and slapped down tangling over Claudine’s feet, and then she bled. An awful scream was uttered from somewhere, Claudine couldn’t tell where, for Mouche was singing again now, and that was what Claudine could not bear. Maddened, she swung wildly at the neck, spinning herself half around, and as she came back, blood from a severed artery showered her, drenching the front of her dress. She stepped back and looked down, inexorably, at the snarl of vitals on the dirt floor. Something else was among them, pulsing inside its membranous sac; it was not exactly independent life, but it still lived a little, as her organs were still slightly living, though Mouche was surely dead. It was the thing, Claudine was confident, that she had wanted to uncover, and she had a desire to open it further, to see and know more, and more, but she did not gratify this wish.

Outside in the yard she stopped, a few feet from the door, to look down at the blood that covered her. She dabbled two fingers in it, noting that Mouche’s blood was just the color of her own, precisely. She made a print, an oval dot, over the place where she’d nicked herself that morning, then stroked a double line down her cheek with her two fingers. The movement dragged down one side of her mouth and when she took her hand away her face stayed fixed in that position, catatonically, as it might in a victim of apoplexy. Isidor stood in the middle of the yard, staring at her, with Marotte several yards behind him. The two gave forth no expression, but stood unmoving like obelisks in a desert. She began to walk, passing Isidor, advancing toward Marotte. When their eyes met, Marotte dropped to her knees like someone had clubbed her, and let out a terrible groan. Claudine passed her blindly by and went into the house.

I
N HER DELIRIUM
the thing came to her and told her that the work of destruction she’d begun would be unending. It had not yet developed to a human shape; it was something different, primal, beaked and gilled, damp and clammy, and always slicked with putrid blood. Sometimes it showed her different visages: a monkey’s face, or an elephant’s trunk, the face of her husband to be sure, or more infrequently her own. She knew it for hallucination, born of delirium tremens, and she knew that drink would stop its coming, but she did not drink. For days at a time she lay in her own ordure on the bed, or wandered through the empty house—Isidor and Marotte had run away, and no one else came near. Like a ghost she walked within the walls, alone or in the company of the thing, which held her finger in a wet, webbed claw, or slithered ahead of her on flippers. If the thing was absent she saw other phantasms, sulfurous fires that swept the cane fields hedge to hedge without consuming them, berserk slaves who danced in clouds of lurid flame, uncaring—she saw Mouche roaming the compound as a headless zombi, her stumped neck a fountain of blood, singing that same song from the wiry flutes of her severed trachea.

But always the thing returned, and when she least expected it—she never learned to expect it, but she might wake to find it settled on her navel, wiggling in a puddle of afterbirth and staring down at her with a dolphin’s black eye or, during her solitary ramblings through the house, it might come on her suddenly from out of the other rooms. It had a metamorphic power and it showed her all its changes from a dot of plasm to a fish into a being like herself, but it let her know that her own being was as futile as some ancient extinct beast. She implored the thing to give her peace, and when that failed she threatened it, and finally made it promises—she said that she would take it into her own body and carry it to its term, but it made no answer to any of her proposals.

Then it went away. She lay there, dreading its return. Her body had died, it seemed. If she raised an arm above her head it would remain there tirelessly; if she bit into her finger or her wrist she could feel nothing, though she saw the tooth prints’ bruise. Still the thing did not come back, and one afternoon she woke to a shadow of sensation. She felt a finality in its absence, though she dared not trust it. For the first time in many days she could feel her body, face her reflection, smell herself—a nasty smell. She felt hollow, burned to a husk, like a bit of
bagasse
blown off the cane fields. Curiously she regarded herself in the gilt-framed looking glass, her dress hanging in brown-stained rags from her shriveled body. In a week she had aged ten years. Behind her the broken door of the storeroom lolled like a tongue from the head of a corpse.

All the children had disappeared from the yard, the chickens were gone too, and it was deathly still except for a fringe of dust that a small breeze carried low across the parched and cracking earth. A red-headed, wrinkle-necked vulture stood on the ground near the door of the shed. Claudine expected it to evaporate when she approached, but it only shrugged its shoulders at her and clawed a few steps away, and finally when she came too near, it lifted itself on its ragged wings and flew to the shed’s roof tree, where three others roosted. She stooped and flung a clod at them with a hoarse cry, but only one was moved to flight, lifting higher and higher on a spiral till it was only a small cross circling in the sky. She waited for it to disappear utterly and so prove itself delusional, but it remained there, slowly turning. She knew that she ought to go into the shed and face whatever was there, but she did not go.

Inside the barn, she washed herself at the horse trough. There were horses still in the stalls; they hung their heads out and whickered at her, but they didn’t seem panicky or restive so she knew that someone must be tending them. The water was reasonably fresh as well. She peeled off the sodden rags of her dress and abandoned them. Her body came clean, staining the water. She thrust her head under and scrubbed her scalp. When she sat up, wringing out her hair, she thought she saw a flicker of human movement, felt an eye upon her, though she hardly cared. She pushed her head under the water again and tried to breathe in, but her body repelled itself and she sat back, spluttering. This time she saw the boy jerk his head back into a vacant stall and she darted after him and trapped him there. A little mulatto, about twelve or thirteen, she didn’t know his name but she thought she’d seen him working as a groom. His teeth were chattering and he wouldn’t look at her.