All Souls' Rising (32 page)

“You don’t believe that.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, with a half smile. “You understand me very well.”

Nanon didn’t respond to him. She stared down at an angle through the porthole. A bare-chested slave was walking down the alley, some loaves of bread bundled under one arm and a basket of fruit balanced on his head. A green parrot perched on his left shoulder, and this somehow reminded her of the afternoon she’d encountered Doctor Hébert in the Place de Clugny.

“I brought you something,” Choufleur said softly.

Nanon looked around. In the palm of his hand was the silver snuffbox embossed with the fleur-de-lis. She laughed at it.

“Do you take me for Maman Maig’?” she said. “It’s pretty, but I don’t use snuff.”

“Open it,” Choufleur said.

Cupped in his palm, the heavy silver caught the light and seemed to glow. When she reached for the box, it was warm to her touch. With her thumb she flipped back the lid and looked. Inside the box was a shriveled brownish thing with a head like a mushroom; at first she thought it was a mushroom but its texture was parchment dry, like a mummy’s skin.

“It was his once,” Choufleur said. “Oh, it was most intimately rooted to him. I think he would have wanted you to have it. But I wonder, did it give you pleasure?”

Nanon blanched. “Never,” she said. “Never in my life, not once.”

Choufleur smiled. “I hope that it will please you better now.”

Nanon snapped the box shut and pushed it toward him.

“You must keep it,” Choufleur said. “Or do what you will with it,
n’importe quoi
. A token of my intentions, let us call it. You see that they are very serious indeed.” He picked up his cane and went out without waiting for any reply.

Nanon put the snuffbox on the rickety table, beside her clay candlestick there. She backed away from it, then moved forward to pick it up again. She opened it and looked at the petrified member curled inside. It was close in the little room, quite airless, and very hot below the lowering roof. A pulse was beating in her throat like a door slamming in the wind. She closed the box and put it on the table.

The door latch clicked and Isabelle Cigny came into the room, her face drawn with anger. She saw the snuffbox first of all, there being no other ornament or bibelot in the whole room, and crossed to take it up.

“Did he bring this?”

“Yes,” Nanon said, indifferently.

“A lover’s gift,
je vois bien
.” She made as if to open it but the handkerchief wadded in her left hand hampered her and she set the box down on the table, still shut.

“You are not to receive your half-breed lovers here.” Madame Cigny slapped Nanon’s face with her right hand. The blow was limp-wristed, without heat, meant to insult rather than to sting. Nanon dropped into the chair Choufleur had occupied and sat with her head lowered meekly over her folded hands.

“I will not have them come here,” Madame Cigny said. “Your…whatever you may call them. My house is not a bordello, do you understand?”

“I understand,” Nanon said tonelessly. Madame Cigny put her hands on her hips and glared at her.

“Yes, and I know that my husband has come scratching at your door at night,” she snapped. “Tell me, why did you turn him away?”

“I have a respect for you,” Nanon murmured, still looking down at the floor.

“I could turn you out at once,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know why I haven’t done it.”

“You are of a stronger character than the people who surround you,” Nanon said.

Isabelle snorted. “Do you think you can flatter me?”

“No,” Nanon said. “I don’t think that.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“W
RITE WHAT
I
SAY
,” Toussaint told to me, Riau, who had become an
I
again from listening to him make me make his words. I sat on a stone above the river with a paper on my knees, waiting to be mounted by the voice of Toussaint the way I would wait sometimes for Ogûn. Beside me, also on the rock, was sitting the little white-man doctor with the beard, and he also held a pen.

The wind was blowing, so the leaves turned back and tossed. Below the rocks by the river shore a red rag clung to a stick where the women had been washing. The rag went streaming along the wind in tatters. Toussaint did not say anything, it seemed like a long time. I thought that when he went away I would climb down the rocks to where the red rag was sticking there.

“
Monsieur
,” Toussaint said. “Yes—write that.”

I moved my pen, so did the doctor.

“
Monsieur
,” Toussaint said. “
We have never…sought to
…to depart. No—don’t write depart. To wander. No. To
deviate. Monsieur, we have never sought to deviate from the duty and from the respect we owe to the King’s representative, nor indeed, to His Majesty
.”

The doctor had stopped moving his pen a long time before I could finish these words. Then Toussaint moved around to stand behind us, looking at what we each had written.

“You have not done it well, Riau,” he said. “Look, see the hand of the doctor. You must make the same letters that he uses in each word.”

But just then someone came calling him from the camp, so he could not go on with his speaking and our writing. I watched him go walking back toward Biassou’s tent. A little bowlegged, swinging his arms. The wind was teasing at the ends of his kerchief, below the knot. He looked back over his shoulder once.

“You must teach him,” he called to the doctor. “The way I taught you herbs.”

I looked at the little doctor sideways, and he looked back at me with half a smile. So I put my paper down and climbed over the rocks until I reached the stick where the rag was hanging. Toussaint had set the doctor over me, to guide my writing. But I was set over the doctor too, to guard him and to keep him safe. This pleased Toussaint, it made him smile. Always he liked to arrange his people so.

Toussaint was not yet what he would become, or if he was he did not show it. They still called him
Médecin Général
. He went around the camps doctoring and showing the whiteman doctor the ways to use the leaves. It was Biassou, Jean-François, Jeannot, who were called generals then. But they were not fighting many battles any longer. No one wanted to fight the whitemen in open country by that time. We had learned that we could not hold the mouths of cannons shut with our hands. A
hûngan
’s word would not often stop a musket ball, and even Ogûn could not always catch a bullet in his teeth. In the mountains to the west the whitemen were strong in their forts and we could not break through the line to the rich land of the western department.

Being a
hûngan
himself Jeannot held
petro
dances in his camp, and being there I danced at these; there I was Ogûn’s horse. Biassou was a
hûngan
also but in this camp I could not dance or lose my head. My head was full of Toussaint’s words and letters and the words were thinking Toussaint’s thoughts. That the rebellion might not last the winter. The Spanish whitemen were sending guns and powder but they could not send food. We had burned so much of the northern plain by then that it was hard to forage for so many. So many all together, stripping the land of food and firewood. Among the Creole slaves were many who did not know how to make an
ajoupa
well enough to keep off the rains. I met men from Bréda, or other places where the slaves were treated well, who would have returned if they had been able. For three days
congé
and abolition of the whip, like the King In France had promised us. Or even without those things which had been promised.

The Spanish whitemen spoke to us of kings, the King In France and the king in their own country. But from the French whitemen we often heard that the King In France was a prisoner in his land. Yes, and we had kings of our own who were made slaves and not one of them ever returned to rule in Guinée unless he passed
en bas de l’eau
. What was coming from France instead of the king’s promises was an army of ten thousand soldiers who would sweep the camps of Grand Rivière and hunt and kill us through the mountains.

Jeannot and Biassou and Jean-François were living like kings of Guinée then, but their only wealth was in the women they could take and the men who would follow them. They did not have many yams or cattle. The words were thinking in my head that they were like the corrupted kings of Guinée who sent the raiders to my village and sold me and my people to the whitemen on the coast. And it was true that Jean-François and Biassou were thinking of selling us then, although I did not understand this until later.

Toussaint helped, or he seemed to help. So did the whiteman doctor, and so did Riau, making words on paper for the
colon
white-men to read. But Toussaint was learning the way to make the words in knots instead of lines, so that they twisted like mating snakes upon each other and would say more than one thing.

The words were struggling in my head as I went climbing down the rocks. I wished that I had run away to Bahoruco with Jean-Pic. At the same time the words thought of Merbillay and of the name of the baby, Pierre Toussaint. I came to where the rag was and held it in my hand and felt it trembling across my fingers, wind pulling it against the piece of stick that held it where it was. Then I saw them coming down the river, him and the woman and all the children, I knew who they were before they were near enough for me to see their faces.

D
OCTOR
H
ÉBERT’S HAIR
had grown very long and the damp wind was whipping the grease-stiffened ends of it across his parted lips and teeth. A cloud had passed across the sun and a thin line of rain was marching up the river, stippling the surface of the water, rain and not-rain divided by a clear frontier. The wind teased at the papers on his lap; he lifted a sheet and puzzled over Riau’s strange orthography, similar to Toussaint’s, in fact. The words were French, not
patois
, though one could not tell by looking. One must sound out the syllables to know.

He looked to where Riau had climbed on the rocks below, apparently to retrieve a bright scrap of rag down there—a childish project, though Riau was not a child, nor was he stupid. Far from that. The doctor saw from a change in his posture that he had noticed something, and he looked upriver, where Riau was watching.

There were seven or eight of them coming along the riverbank, making their way among the rocks: the woman and the children and the white man in a priest’s brown cassock. The apparition of a priest was bizarre in this place; the doctor would scarcely have been more surprised to see a robed cleric descending from a cloud. Then he remembered hearing of a priest in the camp upriver who helped Jeannot select who would be tortured—that and worse.

The priest was sweating, Doctor Hébert saw as he came near. Exhausted too, and stumbling as he moved among the rocks, coming toward Riau, who’d pulled the rag loose from the stick and was twisting it around his hand. He carried a child, some five years old, across his chest, so no doubt it was the burden that so tired him.

“Ah, Riau,” he said, approaching. “Your son is well. And of course the mother.”

Riau said something in reply, but his voice was so low that the doctor could not well hear it. Still holding the red rag in one hand, Riau clambered backward up the rocks, holding out a hand to assist the priest in mounting with the child he carried. The other children stood perched on the points of various stones nearby, raindrops stinging them through their ragged clothes.

“She has an awful fever, our Paulette,” the priest said. “And a cough—we had heard that there was someone here, a
dokté-feuilles
.”

Doctor Hébert looked over the priest’s shoulder into the child’s face. Her hair was sweat-matted and her eyes were slits. She breathed hissingly through bubbles of mucus in her nostrils. The doctor touched her forehead and drew his fingers back from the heat.

“I can help her,” he said. The priest turned to him, his round red face flushed from his effort, his expression open. The doctor felt a thrust of revulsion—this face had arranged for the rape of Hélène by Biassou. Riau had caught the sick girl’s attention with the red rag. He’d bundled it doll-like around a finger and was making it nod what seemed to be its head.

“Follow me,” the doctor said curtly. He turned his back and went stalking toward the camp.

He and Riau had made themselves a snug
ajoupa
on the slope below the makeshift hospital, with walls of sticks laced horizontally and the roof well thatched with palm. Riau’s design—they’d shared the labor. Coals from the morning’s fire still smoked under an adjacent lean-to. Riau blew them into flame and boiled water. The priest and his children, meanwhile, filed one by one into the
ajoupa
. It was raining harder now, and generally, drops patting softly down on the palm thatch, but under the roof the dirt floor was cool and dry.

The doctor reached into one of his several collecting bags and began crumbling dried
lantana
flowers into a gourd, then added some crushed leaves of
giromon
and
herbe à cornette
. He pointed to the priest where he might lay the sick girl on the pallet where he slept himself. Riau came in with the kettle and poured hot water over the herbs to steep. Doctor Hébert wet a rag from the kettle and carefully began cleaning the girl’s snot-sticky face. When the tea had brewed sufficiently, he motioned to the mother to raise the child’s head. As he moved the gourd toward the girl’s cracked lips, she coughed rheumily, and Fontelle, murmuring something, took the gourd out of his hands.

The doctor straightened and took a step back. The children scattered from him, like mice along the wall. They all smelled damp and woolly, rather like wet sheep. In the small space it was impossible not to be near the priest.

“I had not known that Riau was father to a son,” the doctor said, stiffly, unable to quite resist his curiosity on that point.

“I believe so—one cannot be certain,” the priest said. “But the boy exists. I baptized him.”

“I would have assumed that the last rites were more your specialty,” the doctor said.

The priest chuckled uncomfortably. “Perhaps you’ve confused me with Père Duguit,” he said. “Jeannot’s…confessor, as you might say.”

“Is it not yourself?” The doctor glanced around the walls of the
ajoupa
, seeing the priest’s jovial beaverlike features repeated darkly in the faces of the children.

“As you see, I am guilty of many venalities, which I would not wish to deny,” said Père Bonne-chance. “Père Duguit, however, has unfortunately gone insane and lost all control over his own actions. God no longer hears the cries of his unreason.”

“I misapprehended you,” the doctor said. “I must apologize.”

“It’s nothing,” said Père Bonne-chance. “I notice that you yourself are not entirely what you seem.”

The doctor bowed and stepped out of the shelter. Rain collected on his beard and seeped into the corners of his mouth. Then it began to slacken. Riau appeared a step behind him and plucked at his ragged sleeve.

“
Nou alé
,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“
Ki koté?
” the doctor said.

“
Viân
,” Riau said. “Meat.” The doctor had already turned, automatically, to follow him up the slope and into the denser trees.

They climbed above the whole encampment and passed through jungle that was thick with the black boles of wet
gommier
slick-slimy from the rain, overrun with creepers and the vivid wild flowering orchids. The way was very steep and the doctor was in such difficulties he could not much observe the flora, but had to go scrabbling along on his hands and knees sometimes, as the wet leaf-mold was too uncertain a footing for him to walk upright with security. He was sweating very much despite the rainy chill. Meanwhile Riau proceeded ahead of him, always erect and with gazelle-like poise, turning now and then to wait. The black man carried a small cloth-wrapped bundle under his arm and sometimes he would lift a flap and peek at whatever was inside of it.

The rain stopped, but it did not lighten where they were; all remained a cool subaqueous green. They climbed, cutting crossways on the slope. The sounds of the encampment were no longer audible. They had walked perhaps an hour and a half before they came to a gorge where jagged triangles of rock stretched out above a stream some thirty feet below. Here Riau stretched out on his stomach. The doctor, after a moment’s hesitation, joined him. The sun was shining on this place and the surface of the stone was warm and dry.

“We came for this?” the doctor said. “To sunbathe like a pair of snakes?”

Riau hushed him with a gesture and unwrapped the ragged bundle. Inside were the two pistols which the doctor knew the black man to possess; one an unornamented, long-barreled dragoon’s pistol, the other a lighter, fancier gun with a damasked barrel and silver chasings on the grip. Riau passed the larger one toward the doctor, butt first, then turned again to look over the gorge.

Doctor Hébert closed his hand over the dragoon’s pistol unbelievingly; it was much the same as the one he had lost at the time of his capture. He checked the priming. The gun was properly loaded and the powder was dry, so that, if he wished, he could blow the back of the black man’s head off and…then what? The truth was that he had no great wish to injure Riau even if he had believed himself capable of making his way back to the coast alone.