All Souls' Rising (38 page)

Saint-Léger raised Jean-François to his feet and took him with Toussaint and some others back to the gallery with the whitemen there. They were there a long time talking in the
grand’case
while we waited with the horses in the palm
allée
. It was near night before they returned and we started riding back to the camps at Grande Rivière. I was riding near to Toussaint in the dark, and I knew that he was happy, and Jean-François too, because there would be a peace and a stop to all the killing and burning. But the blood was dark running in my heart, because I thought that Jean-François had sold some of us before, and now he would sell all of us.

Then we were going to give up the whitemen prisoners, but many of us did not want to give them back alive, because we thought we were going to be sold back into the cane fields. Many were whispering for the deaths of all the prisoners again, but Biassou did not call for them to be killed now, because Biassou would be free. And I, Riau, when it came time to move them, I struck the irons off the legs of the whitemen so they could walk. The white-women and the children were all loaded into carts.

No one raised a hand against the prisoners then, but I knew that they would be attacked somewhere along the road and I would have been there too, Riau, with my pistols and my knife. Only Toussaint called me apart and he told me to go with the guards and with him protecting the white prisoners along the way. I am not sure why he called me to do this or why I chose to go. Toussaint often could see through my head to look at what was in my heart and know it, so it may be that he knew I would be in ambush at La Tannerie if he did not bring me along with the guards. Maybe I was thinking that if I went with Toussaint and the men he had chosen, then I would be free myself, with them and him and Biassou and Jean-François. Even though I had not been in the tent when the two-faced letters were written, I had heard that there would be four hundred men made free. It happened, though, there were no freedoms given.

The carts with the prisoners started off then, with the whitemen walking behind them and the guards on either side, all of us with the new Spanish muskets and carrying boxes with many cartridges on a sling. At La Tannerie the people came out to kill the whitemen. They were in hundreds and they could have run over us all, even though our guns were better, but they did not really want to fight with us. We did not really want to shoot them either. There I, Riau, came face to face with César-Ami who had been with us in the band of Achille and helped to kill many whitemen and who had come at last to the camp of Biassou. César-Ami raised his cane knife to strike past me to the whitemen who were prisoners but I showed him my musket with its bayonet and he backed away. So we brought the whiteman prisoners through unhurt, nothing worse happening than shouts and a few stones thrown. Then we brought them down to Saint Michel again and gave them to their friends, who were waiting there.

After this was done, we went on to Le Cap to make the peace with the
colons
, like Saint-Léger had fixed it. Jean-François and Biassou did not go, this time Toussaint was going as the messenger. But the
colons
of the Assembly would not keep the promises that Saint-Léger had made. There would not be any freedoms, and no peace either then. I saw Toussaint coming away from that meeting with his eyes shining with sadness. I knew that he was sick with the blood and the killing, and I knew he was angry too because the prisoners had been given up for nothing, and because the
colons
of the Assembly were all fools.

Then we went riding to Bréda plantation. I was not so sorry that the lives of the white prisoners had been saved. I thought maybe I would kill some of them later on in a fight but it was not the same as killing them like cattle in a pen. I was not so sorry that the peace had failed either.

We spent a night at Bréda, because Toussaint wanted to see how things were there, the same as he had managed things for Bayon de Libertat. Most of the slaves were still at work there, and there had not been any burning. Toussaint’s brother Paul was there, still serving as a
commandeur
. It was a good night to spend for me talking to people I had not seen for a long time. Most were happy enough with the way it was at Bréda then. The work was easier because the whitemen had all run away, but still they stayed and worked.

In the morning we rode out from Bréda, and while we were passing through Haut du Cap some men from the
colon
militia attacked us. They were not so many as we, but they must have still believed that we would not know how to stand to an attack of whitemen in the open, when we had no jungle to run into. So I think they were surprised when we had killed them all.

One of these whitemen was the one who had beaten Toussaint that time so long ago when he was walking back to Bréda from the church, reading the book of Epictetus. Toussaint rode him down with his horse. He had the good horse that day, the stallion Bellisarius. The whiteman took shelter in a doorway and Toussaint got off the horse to go after him. He was so angry I could see his shoulders shaking from behind when he slapped at the seams of his green coat.

Do you know who I am?
he said. The whiteman did not answer him. The bayonet was fixed on my musket and Toussaint grabbed it from me and killed the whiteman with the bayonet, I think he must have killed him a hundred times.

I wondered then, was there a
use
of killing this whiteman? I think there must have been. This was not the only time I saw Toussaint kill a man in anger, but it was rare. There were tears in his eyes after he had done. When he finished and the whiteman was lying dead half in and half out of the doorway, he took off his green livery coat, and he dropped it over the whiteman’s face. He took off his shirt too and dropped it somewhere on the body.

All the way back to Grande Rivière he rode with no shirt. Toussaint was an old man, for this place. In Guinée I had known old men, but here most men had died before they had the years Toussaint had then. When we were riding back to Grand Rivière I could see the strength in his body he didn’t often show, how the muscles were hard under his tight skin and gritty white along the ridges like worn stone. He was thin still, but no one would anymore think to call him
Fatras-Baton
. There were no whip scars on his back, because Toussaint had never been under the whip.

That was the last day he wore the green coat. Later on, he began to wear the uniform of a whiteman officer.

R
IAU POUNDED THE RIVET OUT OF THE DOCTOR’S
remaining shackle, and the iron opened and fell away from his boot, splitting like two halves of a nut. Reflexively he took off his boots and rubbed along the ridge of his shins, though the boot uppers had protected from any hurt. Père Bonne-chance, who was bare-legged, had his ankles blistered and rubbed raw. The doctor might have made a salve for them, but his herbs and medicines were at the hospital
ajoupa
, and it soon appeared that he would have no chance to return for them before all the prisoners were taken away.

The heavy wood wagon wheels grated and began to turn, and the men fell into line behind them. They marched in a double column with guards flanking them on either side. The camp at Grande Rivière was oddly silent as they left and none of the blacks came out to see them depart from that place. Père Bonne-chance was a long time looking back over his shoulder, and the doctor knew that he must be thinking of Fontelle and the children, but he had nothing to say to him because he had no better idea than the priest where they might have gone. For other reasons than that, his mind was uneven. One rumor ran back through the captives that they were to be released but there were other voices urging that they were merely being taken to some other place to be killed there.

They marched along by a low swampy place where egrets were standing spindle-legged in the dark water and hairy little black crabs had climbed the trees. Mosquitoes boiled out in swarms to bite them there. They climbed over a mountain pass where the women and children had to get down from the wagons and the guards must work in harness with the mules to draw them over the summit. As they came down the other side, a wild goat dashed across the head of the column and two of the guards gave chase and shot it. Toussaint rode back and rebuked them for breaking ranks and firing a shot without an order, but he halted the march long enough for the goat to be bled and gutted, and they went on with two men carrying it with its legs lashed to a pole.

By the time they came to La Tannerie, the march had degenerated into a stagger. A crowd of blacks was waiting for them there, all in a sweat and a fury, flailing sabers and cane knives. They knew that the prisoners were going to the coast to be released, but they said that they would kill them and send only their heads to Le Cap. There was a flurry as the mob pressed up against the guards. A stone or a stick clipped the corner of the doctor’s mouth, and he tasted his own blood another time. Toussaint was shouting something from the back of the big stallion he rode, but the clamor from the others drowned him out almost completely. Riau was holding his musket braced like a crossbar to shield them against further blows, and Doctor Hébert saw a saber descend on the barrel and ring aside. He saw too that the swordsman did not really mean to hurt Riau, for if he had he easily could have stabbed him in the body.

So they came through. A couple of men among the prisoners were bruised or lightly cut and the women had all flattened themselves across their children in the wagons. The goat was lost, tumbled in the dust behind the column. As the doctor looked, he saw a group of scavengers quarreling for possession of the meat. They went on. The doctor noticed he had been slashed deeply across the meat of his forearm. It must happened during the scuffle at La Tannerie, but he had not felt it then and now it gave no more than a dull ache, which rather troubled him. He walked cradling the arm; the blood flow slowed and stopped and the blood dried to a black crust and blowflies whined around the edges of the wound. He had no resource for his own cure for he had left his herb bag at Grand Rivière and in any case he could not stop to treat the injury.

At evening’s end they came to the edges of the Saint Michel cane fields. The doctor wondered to see cane still standing—it had been so long since he’d seen anything but ruin or wild jungle. By the time they reached the palm
allée
, a deep blue darkness had lowered over them. No one spoke as they rode down the
allée
toward the
grand’case
. It was very quiet except for the creaking of the wagon wheels and the hooves of the horses sounding on the packed earth. In the gap of sky above the palms there hung a sliver of new moon and the long leaves of the palms shivered together with a sound that reminded the doctor of rain.

In the garden before the
grand’case
they had lit many torches, so that the arrangement of the plots could be well seen. A simple affair: a cross and concentric circles producing a pattern of crescent-shaped beds expanding from the stilled fountain at the center. Some of the beds had been trampled over and the flowers and shrubs battered down, and all were suffering from neglect, but still the doctor’s eye was taken by the firm regularity of the design. It was mostly jungle foliage, but all strictly ranged by human hands.

He stood a little apart from the others. The fringes of hair at the sides of his head had grown long during his captivity, and now they were lifted up to tease at his bald crown by the same wind that shivered the palm leaves. His hurt arm had gone numb, and the thought of the wound had ceased to trouble him. The column of guards had fallen away, and Toussaint was holding his horse well back. There were white men on the gallery, and some infantrymen standing in loose order on the far side of the garden. The distance was too great and the light too poor for them to make out one another’s faces.

No one moved, on either side. As if they each awaited an order from the other, a signal or a sign. Then one of the women cried out and swung her skirted legs over the rail of a wagon. She called a word, a name, something indistinguishable, and began running toward the people gathered near the
grand’case
. The doctor thought it was Hélène, but he might have been mistaken, for whoever it was carried a child in her arms. Then all the women and children were scrambling down from the carts and dashing toward the
grand’case
with their arms outstretched, calling out the names of the people they knew, and trampling more of the flowers in their haste.

A group of three or four women had fallen in immediately with the soldiers. They had not come from the camp at Grand Rivière, but had joined the column along the march from La Tannerie, so the doctor did not know them. But they all seemed to be pointing at him, and calling,
That’s the one, there, c’etait lui
…

Three or four of the infantrymen came thumping across the flower beds. Brushing past the doctor, they laid hold of the priest. Someone drove a gun stock into his side, and as he moved away from the blow he stepped on the hem of his cassock and fell. On the ground, he rolled about rather nimbly, to avoid the kicks that were coming his way. Two soldiers snatched him up by the elbows and hustled him away.

It all happened too quickly for the doctor to react; besides, his capacity for astonishment was greatly attenuated. He advanced a little way and stopped again, within the first precincts of the garden’s scheduled pathways. Others of the released prisoners were still rushing past him, calling out greetings to friends that they knew, but the ranks of white faces around the steps to the gallery were still foggy to the doctor, no more than a blur. He was quite alone where he was standing there. Someone was calling
Antoine, Antoine!
and a man threw his hat into the air, and caught it. A man in uniform, Captain Maillart. The doctor remained as if rooted on the garden path, swaying slightly from his knees. It seemed to him that he had completed the errand on which he had come and that he was now free to return to the camp with the others and take up his duties at the field hospital there. He looked over his shoulder to where Toussaint sat his horse, his face sealed away in the shadows; he looked for Riau but could not find him. He was free, alone, his freedom was equal to his isolation. After a long time, as it felt to him, he broke from his place and began walking along the curved garden pathway to join the other white people.