All Souls' Rising (60 page)

Then they were through, stumbling into the stable yard. One of Crozac’s grooms was running from stall to stall opening all the doors; the fire had already caught the stable roof though it had not yet burned through. The horses and mules all came out in a screaming terror. The groom swung himself up to the bare back of one and rode out the opposite corner of the yard, where there seemed to be no live fire but only smoldering, another unnumbered horseman of this apocalypse.

When the doctor pried the child’s head away from Nanon’s bosom, he straightaway began to howl, an excellent sign he had not been seriously injured. Relieved, the doctor sat down on the ground and began reloading all the guns. At Nanon’s desperate shriek he jumped up with a pistol in either hand. One of the blacks had been frenzied enough to follow them through the fire after all, but before he had quite emerged from the alley, the doctor shot him through the forehead and he toppled over backward into the bed of multicolored flames.

The child was sobbing quietly now, exhausted from his screaming. Nanon opened the bodice of her gown and gave him suck to comfort him. Her head was bare now, hair all scorched and singed; she’d lost her bundle in their passage through the fire.

The doctor reloaded his pistol and walked over to peer in the open door of Crozac’s living quarters. It appeared that the fleeing groom, or someone else, had paused to slit the farrier’s throat. The dead man lay in a scorching pool of his own blood; all around him, fire was gnawing through the floorboards.

“Don’t look,” the doctor said to Nanon, and all at once was racked with laughter. The idea she should be disturbed by the sight of a dead body…Tears spurted from his eyes; his sobs were like vomiting. She remained ice-white, ice-calm before him, as if she were walking in her sleep. Or was it really vomiting? Really
mal de Siam
, in the end? He was on his hands and knees, her hands on his shoulders, pressing to soothe him. At length he composed himself enough to stand.

He had brought them there in hope of finding a horse, but they had all stampeded off when the groom had let them go. The doctor walked along the row of empty stalls. In the last but one, there was a mule; the stall was open like the others but for some reason the mule had been tied to the feedbox, and stood there snorting and lashing against the restraint. The doctor slipped to its head and undid the lead and brought it out. Seeing the flames, the mule began to jerk its ax-shaped head and scream. It took all the doctor’s remaining strength to keep control of it.

The animal was too panicky for Nanon to mount, and because the tack room was fully on fire there was no question of bridle or saddle. They left the stable yard still on foot, following in the direction the groom had taken. The northern quarters of the town were already burned almost to rubble, and the marauders who still frolicked among these ruins were too engaged in their own ecstasies to notice the pilgrims who crept by with their half-mad mule.

From La Fossette a pestilent fog was boiling, cool and full of mosquitoes and of
mauvaisces humeurs
. The doctor was glad of this thickening of the darkness. Now the mule had calmed enough for Nanon to ride, first slashing a vertical rip in her long skirt so she could straddle the animal. The doctor handed the child up to her, noticing then that her light satin shoe was burned to a rag around her ankle. The sole of her foot was horribly blistered; he lowered his head and kissed the air above it.

He led the mule around the lower curve of Morne du Cap and on into the jungle. Maybe he had at last become familiar with the ways and byways, or maybe it was the gruesome pain in his head that led him onward like a beacon, but whatever the cause he seemed able to choose their direction without hesitating. They went on.

I
T SEEMED TO HIM THAT IT WAS
day again and that he was slumped over the mule’s back, Nanon leading it and also carrying the child, and while he tried to protest she insisted he must ride and rest. Again, some other time, another night, Nanon was feeding him a paste of mashed bananas she must have foraged somewhere, but he could not swallow it and he signaled her that she must give it all to the child instead. His fever no longer abated with daylight; instead it seemed to worsen. Now he could not even keep down water. He crawled away from the trail on hands and knees, puking a black stinking bile he knew was his own rotten blood. Another time, lying on his back, he saw some sprigs of herbs he thought might help him, and he motioned Nanon to pluck them and put them in his mouth to chew. The leaves could not be brewed, for out of all that fire and destruction they’d brought away no means to strike a light of their own.

They went on, through dark to light to dark again. The doctor chewed his bitter herbs, which won him no remission. How greatly he had deluded himself with his belief he would not die of fever. The pain was extraordinary, like a nail through his skull, and he heard himself repeating the phrase aloud:
Comme cloué, comme cloué
. Then,
No
, another voice answered,
you are not nailed
. Nanon’s hand upon his forehead was now Toussaint’s, but he had to tell this darker man that he was surely dying. Then Toussaint said that he would not die yet, that there was still a use for him upon the earth. At this the doctor choked on a cry and protested that he had lately killed more men than he’d had the leisure to count and that he was not a healer but a murderer. Toussaint smiled and stroked his burning brow and said that out of all this death and ruin it would still be possible for them to work a healing.

On his fire-blistered feet the doctor staggered through mountain passes always leading the mule where Toussaint, dressed in his green coat and knotted headcloth and carrying his bag of herbs across his knees, seemed to have replaced Nanon and the child. As he had sometimes done before, Toussaint quizzed him about European politics and science and asked him his interpretation of all he recently had witnessed.

Tell me, Toussaint said. Tell me all you think of what you’ve seen. Let me know the reasons that you’d give for it.

Well I don’t know, the doctor said. But there must be some reason.

Why must there? Toussaint said. Give me the reason of it. What does it mean?

The doctor’s back was to Toussaint on the mule but still he heard him well enough and felt the old man’s foxy smile.

I can’t tell you. But it does mean something. It must mean something. It can’t mean nothing. It cannot.

That night he slept beside the trail full of a confidence that the world was as sensible as he’d declared it was, even if he’d never grasp the sense of it. When he woke, an hour before dawn, his fever had completely broken. At first light they continued their way. He was visited by no more hallucinations and whenever he looked back he recognized it was Nanon astride the mule with the child on her lap looking about with calm alert interest at everything they passed. The distance still to go was less than he’d supposed and the sunrise was just clearing the mountains when they came into the groves of coffee above Habitation Thibodet.

If his head still hurt the pain was comfort, now an aspect of the clarity he had regained—he contained it, rather than it surrounding him. There was order in the world spread out below him. In the camp of Toussaint’s six hundred, they were just extinguishing their breakfast fires. From the quarters, the slaves came marching in a double column toward the cane, Delsart directing them and their
commandeur
counting cadence while the rest of them all sang cheerfully enough. The doctor looked up at Nanon, who returned his smile, gazing at him dreamily. He snapped the lead rope and led the mule down past the coffee trees and through the cane fields into the yard.

There was someone on the
grand’case
gallery, a total stranger, though he did not seem unfriendly. He had on a loose white shirt and long dark hair gathered loosely at the back and he was cleaning his nails with an enormous knife. He looked up at them with some considerable surprise, then turned to shout a word into the house, perhaps a name.

What a sight they must present, indeed. The doctor felt like laughing. He took the child from Nanon and set him down. A semi-circular area of grass had been maintained just in front of the gallery, and now the doctor noticed that some flowers had been freshly planted round the border. He offered his hand to help Nanon get down. When she had dismounted, he noticed for the first time that the mule was a dark whiskey color and that there was a blue cross over its shoulders and down its spine.

Up the hill among the coffee trees there was still a late cock crowing, though now the sun’s round was fully in the sky. The child sat cross-legged in the grass, chuckling and fingering the blades; some of them were still damp with the dew. He was too young yet to stand unsupported, though he might pull himself up on the edge of a table or a chair.

A door clapped inside the house, and in his inner ear the doctor heard the name that the man had called.
Elise
. It was not his sister though, who first appeared, but a little girl in a blue-printed dress, running barefoot down the steps toward them. Her eyes were only for the baby, the doctor saw. She ran toward where he sat in the damp grass, waving her arms in winglike sweeps and shaking dark ringlets back from her face. But when she had come almost within reach of them she stopped and stood abashed.

The doctor looked toward the
grand’case
. Now Elise had appeared on the gallery; she froze for an instant, then drew in her breath and came forward again, walking down the steps toward him. Her robe was somewhat overlong so that he couldn’t see her feet, so that she seemed to float. After all, he could not absolutely meet her eyes. He looked down. The baby had scooted on his bottom, nearer to the little girl, and he was reaching both arms up to her, wanting to touch the pattern of her dress, or possibly to raise himself on her. The little girl looked up at the doctor uncertainly.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “He is your cousin. You may take his hands.”

Envoi

T
HE FIRE IN
L
E
C
AP BURNED FOR THREE DAYS
. Throughout that time no darkness fell, the night was brighter than the day, sufficient for men on the decks of the ships in the harbor to read their letters and despatches without the aid of other light, while ash and cinder rained all over them, and during that first darkless night the same fiery glow was cast on Polverel and Sonthonax in the salon of the great house of Bréda where the older man paced along the windows in rapidly exchanging states of exaltation and despair, as the younger one would more commonly do, but now Sonthonax had entered that state of grim fixity he would reach whenever the world itself outran his tongue and so with the blades of firelight redly flicking at his page he wrote
:

W
E DECLARE THAT THE WILL OF THE
F
RENCH
R
EPUBLIC AND OF ITS DELEGATES IS TO GIVE FREEDOM TO ALL THE
N
EGRO WARRIORS WHO WILL FIGHT FOR THE
R
EPUBLIC UNDER THE ORDERS OF THE CIVIL COMMISSAIRES, AGAINST
S
PAIN OR OTHER ENEMIES, WHETHER INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL
—

…
and he licked the tip of his pen and wrote
:

T
HE
R
EPUBLIC AND THE CIVIL COMMISSAIRES ALSO WISH TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF THE OTHER SLAVES
—

…
and upon the conclusion of this sentence he thought for a moment more and then he wrote
:

A
LL THE SLAVES DECLARED FREE BY THE DELEGATES OF THE
R
EPUBLIC WILL BE EQUAL TO ALL FREE MEN…THEY WILL ENJOY ALL THE RIGHTS BELONGING TO
F
RENCH CITIZENS
—

…
all these words being necessary (at least to him) because Sonthonax, ever the
avocat,
forever sought to clothe the event in words to give it a more advantageous meaning, or perhaps he even believed what he was saying, and had always intended it, as his admirers and accusers would later maintain (later, when the fire flashed in their eyes) and some would claim that Sonthonax intended these words only to frighten Galbaud away, but that would have been superfluous: Galbaud and his whole faction being already so thoroughly disposed of that on the morrow morn the entire fleet set sail, away from the unceasing precipitate of ash and coal (dawn being darker than the night in truth, so long as that great fire still burned) toward Baltimore, where some of those several thousands of refugees would forget Saint Domingue in their urgency to begin new lives, and others would gnaw their bitterness until they died, and others still would plot to recover all they’d lost and some of these latter would indeed be determined or mad enough to return—still none of them tarried to impress themselves with Sonthonax’s latest proclamation; they were gone, and with their going came if not the absolute end of white power in Haiti, at least the beginning of that end, a thought which those mostly African illuminati must certainly have cherished as they reveled in the roast and ruin of Le Cap throughout the three days Sonthonax had promised them and would faithfully deliver (although General Lasalle had come up with fresh troops from the south and begged to be allowed to restore order in the city), for Sonthonax was after all a man of his word—while Polverel fretted and chewed his nails to the bloody quick and Choufleur sucked his cinnamon stick and smiled behind his hand—all of them foregathered in the house at Bréda where the first agents provocateurs had made Toussaint the initial payment for organizing this all-too-successful provocation, and by day or night the firelight bathed them; it would be with them all their lives, as it pursued Galbaud’s fleet on its voyage to North America, shining so winningly on the billows that bore up the ships, for this was a most assiduous fire, determined to throw its light upon the future; it would not burn low, and it still burned in Sonthonax, tingling to his fingertips when, before the end of summer (still astonished at the fact that the bands of Pierrot and Macaya, once Le Cap had been utterly despoiled, abandoned the white French republicans to return to their roving on the northern plain, indifferent to any enticements in or out of his power to offer them), he wrote another proclamation which emancipated
ALL THE SLAVES
, not freeing them any more than Lincoln did in the next century but simply admitting that they were free (and it may be that Sonthonax believed so all along but he was so devious, so studied in his cunning, that none could ever fathom his beliefs) and so the fire passed over Sonthonax as well, razing him to a scorched stump at last in spite of his remarkable resilience, for this wise fire was all-consuming as history itself, as Toussaint might have put it, there in his camp at Ennery or later in the Fort de Joux, Toussaint having been as best he could manage a student of history all his life, learning that what had once been could be again, so coming to believe that he could be in truth the black Spartacus Abbé Raynal had predicted to come forth and achieve the freedom of his people; therefore the fire was his intimate friend, and he knew how to use it (certainly Toussaint used all his friends, being far more cunning than even Sonthonax) as a weapon or simply as a light, a light he’d live with longer than he wished to, for it shone on him (however faintly) through the layered bars and gratings of his cell at the Fort de Joux, so that he stretched his hand and probed his fingers through the grate, turning and turning them in hope of reaching some shadow of the warmth of that old fire, but it was useless; he had passed too far into the future, and those coals were dead for a decade, were they not? or perhaps indeed they were not, so that if Toussaint had been able to lure the First Consul to his cell, he could have produced a live coal from the pocket of his waistcoat, holding it between his finger calluses in the manner of a countryman lighting his pipe—but Bonaparte would not come, so that Toussaint must turn backward toward that time when the fire originally was bright, when by the light which disseminated itself from the pyre of Le Cap to Ennery he first began to scrutinize the intentions of Sonthonax, wondering if they were more or less consonant with his own design than those of the Spanish, or the English, or even the Americans toward whom he also turned this illumination; meanwhile he began to pass over the country in his own extraordinary fashion (those first six hundred men increasing to tens of thousands) and the fire followed him but did not consume him or his works; under his command nothing was burned nor any man killed without reason—not all or everything was saved but everything was used for a purpose—and General Laveaux, seeing these things, threw down his hat and declared “this man makes an opening everywhere” (but he was already Toussaint-Louverture; he had already finished the letter) and he would still use the fire as need presented, knowing the old coals could always be blown again to life, as he would rekindle them a few years later to burn rebuilt Le Cap to the ground a second time—yes, if he had to he’d use this instrument more broadly still, denying the land to white invaders, he would burn the island so close to its bedrock that a crow could not fly over it without risk of starvation—let the fire take it before the enemy enjoyed it—and it was ever a hungry fire, rapacious to consume time as well as distance, reaching with its lava-dripping salamander digits to grasp and devour Galbaud, Sonthonax, Leclerc, Napoleon himself, whoever sought to leave it in the past it would pursue them, still burning across oceans, across centuries, a wind out of time’s vortex driving it on to level cities of the new lands of the future for whenever it burned down to coals a breath would bring them back to the flame-flower (this fire would return from the least spark even, being so tenacious); and out of that long smoldering the fire that started in Le Cap is burning still, still rendering and dividing, so that everyone must be compelled to admire how whitely the flames rise in their pallor above the black charcoal, though the firelight has such a terrible time to travel through, like the light of a long-dead star, emerging from a history so remote and distant it seems almost quaint: the far-off screaming deaths of all those people whose fat came sputtering down into the coals of the ruined city’s white-hot foundation, whose stories were written on their skins as if their skins became the parchment of the pages you turn and examine by the light of a lamp whose oil was rendered off their bones—such a fire as that may fade but never grow entirely dark, never to be extinguished altogether, it is burning still, still striving to find its way into the future, wanting to burn through to you who believe yourself inured to atrocity, to murder in the streets, to throw some illumination on your life be it faint and slight as the pinprick of green luminescence on your watch dial—it is coming still, it is still here. But no one sees the light
.