All Souls' Rising (8 page)

The chicken tasted good to him, though its peppery seasoning was unfamiliar. There were sweet potatoes too, and fried plantain. He ate slowly, though he was very hungry, and quietly looked about the room. To his left, the strangely speckled mulatto, if mulatto he were, tossed down his cards with a whispered curse.

The doctor’s legs had stiffened while he sat at the table, and his saddlesore thighs chafed in their tight breeches as he strolled toward the theater. There was little to distinguish the building from any other from without and he might have missed it altogether if Captain Maillart had not been waiting for him outside as they had agreed by letter. Their embrace was warmer than the doctor might have looked for; they’d known each other from childhood, both being Lyonnaisse, but had never been close friends.

Maillart held him at arm’s length. “The sun’s told on you,” he cried, examining the doctor’s peeling scalp. “But you look well. Where do you stay?”

Doctor Hébert mentioned Crozac and the inn. Maillart jerked his jaw with a cross emphasis. “I’d have found you a better farrier in the regiment,” he said. “But it’s a whole thieves’ alley thereabouts, no wonder. You’d be better off with a berth on a ship, or a billet with me at Les Casernes. But never mind, we’ll find something for you.”

Arm in arm, they entered the theater. The walls were washed to a pale shade and pleasantly lit with candles in sconces. The theater seemed about half full; Maillart let him know it would hold fifteen hundred spectators. He pointed out Governor Blanchelande in his box, and the other box reserved for the
intendant
, the latter empty this evening. Maillart himself had taken seats in the amphitheater along with several other young officers of the Regiment Le Cap. The doctor passed through several rapid introductions, not quite catching the names. He was pressed for news of Paris, but he’d been long enough at Ennery that most of the officers were more current than he.

As soon as the colored women began to enter their boxes, the political talk died off. Of course the mulattresses didn’t come directly in with the officers; their boxes were in the rank above, and reached by a separate stairway. But once they were in place, they were no more than a hand’s reach away. A rotund young captain whose name the doctor thought was Baudin tore the white cockade from his hat and tossed it upward as a favor, addressing the woman who reached across her rail to catch it by her first name, Fleur.

Fleur, Jasmine, Chloe and Nanon were the four women in the box immediately overhead—so the doctor could gather from the banter that passed between him and the members of his party. The women knew the officers by their first names as well. All four were slim and lovely, close to white whatever mix of blood they carried, and dressed and coiffed to rival ladies of the court. To the officers’ banter they responded not with the minced coquetry of French
demimondaines
, but with a slow and balanced languor, a rich dark energy like waves moving through molasses.

All this while the officers chattered to them loudly, an excruciatingly circumstantial discourse couched in language that would have embarrassed a barnyard animal. A raw blush struck the doctor at the roots of his hair and stained him halfway down to his navel, so it felt; he was relieved to think that in this light it probably would not show. He turned to the stage, where the blue curtain was slowly lifting from behind two gargantuan busts of satyrs.

So the play began, a comedy. To the doctor it seemed poorly written, worse performed, the actors often faltering, requiring prompts, and yet he did his best to bend his mind upon the stage. The officers’ raillery with the girls continued apace, though
sotto voce
now. The room seemed close, even underfilled as it was, and the doctor was in an uncomfortable sweat. Mosquitoes plagued him too; a cloud of them hung over the whole amphitheater. Maillart and the others seemed insensible of the bites, though now and again one of them would automatically slap himself.

Finally the play lurched to its intermission and the curtain lowered for the
entr’acte
. The doctor got up and followed Maillart into the bustling corridors. A cluster formed around the governor, men of affairs taking this opportunity to catch Blanchelande’s ear in an idle moment. Captain Maillart cut efficiently through the crowd, the doctor washing along in his wake.

“What do you think of our players?” Maillart said over his shoulder.

“Abominable,” the doctor said, with no pause for reflection.

Maillart chuckled. “Ah well. There was an actor here who told the committee, ‘You’d be in poor shape to pay me if I
did
know my parts.’”

The doctor smiled, turned his head in owlish circles, looking at the people. There were many of the merchants and the planters there, some with their wives or daughters, white women in fair numbers too and in their full regalia. He was thinking that Monsieur or Madame Cigny might well be in the company, if he could find someone who knew them and would make the introduction, but Captain Maillart seemed to have another course in mind. Quickly, he drew the doctor out of the building.

Outside it was certainly cooler, the night air almost chill. They overtook the other officers of their party in the
promenade du gouvernement
. A tall young rake with great mustachios, whose name the doctor had not caught, had drawn the woman called Chloe into a niche and was kissing her and pinching her haunches with great freedom, while she giggled and feigned to push his hands away. All along the promenade were other couples similarly engaged, but the doctor and Maillart came face to face with Nanon and Jasmine, who were for the moment unattached.

“Oh Nanon,” Captain Maillart pronounced in an artificially lisping tone, “
Je te présente mon grand ami, Antoine
.”

The woman smiled, revealing a top row of small, white, perfect teeth. Her lips were heavy, blade-shaped and blood-red. The doctor bowed slightly from the waist, keeping his eyes on hers, which were large and almond-shaped and looked black to him in the indistinct light, which turned her skin the color of old ivory. Her dress was tightly fitted and clung to her thighs, with the bodice cut low, almost to the nipple, a star of multicolored orchids resting on her mostly naked bosom. She offered her hand to the doctor; it floated toward him along a graceful liquid arc. Her palm was cool and dry when it met his, long yellowy fingers creeping round his wrist, a nail turned in to catch his pulse between the tendons.

“Oh, isn’t she lovely,” Maillart breathed into his ear, but audibly enough to carry. “She’s made for love—and yours for the asking.”

The doctor’s heart slammed rubbery against his ribs. The chafed swaths along his inner thighs began to blaze. To hold a woman’s hand and look her in the eye and hear a proposition such as this—he did not know what his feeling was, but it was strong enough, for an instant, to paralyze him. Nanon breathed; the orchids rose on her breast, and from the skin beneath them lifted a cloud of drunken scent which sealed him in its sphere. She stroked her top lip with the tip of her tongue, a cat’s gesture; her whole head had the catlike beauty he knew he must have seen somewhere before.

“I beg your pardon,” Doctor Hébert said in his most formal manner. “
Je vous en prie
—I’ll hope that we may meet again, but on some other footing.”

He pressed her hand between his two, once firmly, and released it. With her fingertips she caught her skirt and gave him a half curtsy, an opaque movement, uninterpretable. She was gone; both women had retreated.

Captain Maillart seemed a little glum, going back into the theater. They took their seats in silence. The hall looked empty, quieter than before; about half their party had not returned when the curtain rose on the second act. The doctor crushed a mosquito on the back of his neck and brushed away the broken bits of it. Grimly, he concentrated on the sluggish movement of the play. Maillart sighed and draped a hand across the doctor’s shoulder and began to rearrange and fondle his lapel.

“You mustn’t be shocked,” he said in a tender voice. “It’s what they’re good for. After all, they’re not white women.”

The doctor looked around the seats. Only Jasmine and Fleur had returned to the box above them. But Captain Baudin had cork-screwed around in his chair and was blowing kisses and talking moonily enough for a dozen.

“
Ah, tes fesses, Jasmine
,” he rhapsodized. “
Tes jolies fesses, comme j’aimerais les baiser encore une seule fois
.”

“Never mind,” Maillart went on meanwhile, still whispering to the doctor. “You’ve only got to learn our ways.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” the doctor said, and snorted out a sort of laugh. “After all, it seems there’s a better comedy in the back rows than there is on the stage.”

Chapter Five

B
EFORE DAWN
the baby woke and cried a little, snuffling against his mother’s side. Suzanne hushed him, turning to give him the breast, turning toward her husband as well, since the baby slept between them. The man lay so still that she did not disturb him with a word, though she didn’t believe he was sleeping. Two roosters were crowing, far apart, one in the barnyard and one in the hills, and Toussaint, who had wakened with the baby’s first cry, rested quietly on his back and listened to them. The young cock had trounced the old rooster the week before, flattened him in the dust and kicked him bloody with his spurs and driven him off into the jungle. Each time Toussaint heard the loopy lifting of his voice above the other jungle noise he was surprised to know he’d made it through another night.

He groped with his left hand in the dark and stroked the narrow back of his youngest son, Saint-Jean, and rubbed the tight thin curls on top of his head. The baby pulled loose from the nipple and grazed his father’s arm with a small slack-fingered hand, humming a low note, just beginning to whimper. Suzanne murmured to him and guided him back to the breast. Toussaint folded his hands across his navel, let himself drift. When he next came to, Saint-Jean had fallen back to sleep and Suzanne had risen and gone for water. The baby wormed his way toward him on the pallet, searching in his sleep, and nuzzled along his ribs. Toussaint smiled at him in the dark, and disengaged himself carefully so Saint-Jean would not wake.

He got up and crossed the room barefoot to wake his two older sons, Isaac and Placide, who were six and seven. The boys sat up at his first touch, quickly and silently, as he had taught them. Toussaint hustled them out the door, into the first gray twinge of light. Over at the main compound, the bell tolled to rouse the field slaves for the morning. Suzanne had returned with the water and she poured a generous measure on each of the boys, from a big clay urn. Isaac jumped giggling from one leg to the other as the water struck him, but Placide stood stiffly under the stream, legs apart, and only shook himself once, like a dog, before he scrubbed. The light was coming up suddenly, silvering the droplets as they flew. Toussaint washed himself, slowly and with greater care, after the others had gone back into the cabin.

The light swelled. Already he could begin to feel the heat. Inside the cabin it was bright enough to read by the time he reentered. He put on his shirt and reached his Psalter down from the board above the door where it was kept with a few other books and sat down and opened it on the ribbon. When he signaled to the boys they came and stood at his either hand, not eagerly but with their smooth habitual obedience.

“Save me, O God,” he read from the Sixty-ninth Psalm, “for the waters are come in, even unto my soul.

I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is, I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me
.

I am weary of crying; my throat is dry; my sight faileth me for waiting so long upon my God
.

They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head; they that are mine enemies, and would destroy me guiltless, are mighty
…

He read in a low voice, little better than a monotone, though he pronounced each word most clearly and went very slow, marking the page with the cracked yellow nail of his forefinger, so that Isaac and Placide could follow. Placide could, indeed, already read many of the words, and his eye went darting ahead on the page. Toussaint continued:

I am become a stranger to my brethren, even an alien unto my mother’s children
.

For the zeal of thine house hath even eaten me; and the rebukes of them that rebuked thee are fallen upon me
.

I wept, and chastened myself with fasting, and that was turned to my reproof
.

I put on sackcloth also, and they jested upon me
…

Suzanne, too, sat in an attitude of reverence, but keeping her hands busy. She cut fruit for the family to eat when prayer was done, and sliced cold yam and put it salted into a bag for them to carry for their midday meal.

But, Lord, I make my prayer unto thee in an acceptable time
.

Hear me, O God, in the multitude of thy mercy, even in the truth of thy salvation
.

Take me out of the mire, that I sink not; O let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters
.

Let not the waterflood drown me, neither let the deep swallow me up; and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me
…

The light was coming in at the cabin door, and with it a little blue-striped lizard, which froze just across the threshold, hanging in a brilliant beam. Toussaint felt Isaac shift his head to look at it. He continued to read, watching the child from the corner of his eye, thinking that these two might already be acquainted, for the lizard had given up one tail. A skinny new one was just beginning to sprout from the fat socket of the old. He caught the back of Isaac’s head in the pinch of his thumb and forefinger and so turned his attention to the Psalter again.

Draw nigh unto my soul, and save it; O deliver me, because of mine enemies
.

Thou hast known my reproach, my shame, and my dishonour: mine adversaries are all in thy sight
.

Reproach hath broken my heart; I am full of heaviness: I looked for some to have pity on me, but there was no man, neither found I any to comfort me
…

Before he’d finished reading, the boys’ eyes were sliding toward the food, but he went on to the end of the psalm at the same slow rate and guided them through the Our Father before he let them eat. There were some cakes of cassava meal as well as mango and banana, but Toussaint took only a few slices of fruit and ate them quickly. Saint-Jean still slept, turned on his back. Toussaint knelt and laid his palm above the baby’s naked stomach, not quite touching, but near enough to feel the warmth. He moved his hand so that the infant’s breath stirred across his fingers, the broken one, stiff from its old injury, seeming to lift and flex with it. Sitting on the pallet’s edge he drew on his boots, then rose and took his green livery coat down from its peg. He stood fingering the faded bloodstains on the shoulders for a moment before he put it on. Suzanne was watching him from the corner, her lips drawn in.

He shrugged into the coat and snapped his fingers. Isaac and Placide ran out shouting into the new light. Toussaint moved to the corner, reached into the dim to take his wife’s hand. She bent her neck, for she was taller than he, and he touched his forehead to hers. Without saying anything, he went out after the boys, following them through the screen of trees between them and the row of other slave cabins, all stoutly built of plank, like the one they lived in, but thatched in the old way, with broad palm leaves. The young yellow rooster, new cock of the walk, strutted up and down before the empty doorways. The slaves in the main crew were already on their way to the fields, and Toussaint could hear their songs receding as he and his sons went toward the barn.

He walked with long assuring strides, though he was bandy-legged, and fast enough that a lace of sweat broke out across his high forehead. The heat was thick, like a damp blanket. He waved the boys into the barn and walked down to the stone water trough, which two slaves were just refilling. There was a tree beside the trough and Toussaint hesitated in its shade, feeling the sweat beads popping along the tight inner seams of his coat. The other slaves withdrew with their emptied vessels and Toussaint looked down at his own shadow trembling on the ruffled water, watched a green-winged dragonfly come hovering across the indistinct reflection. It was here, long ago when he was young, that he’d struck Béager, who’d been
gérant
in the days before Bayon de Libertat. For some reason his mind had run back almost daily to that time, ever since Bayon de Libertat had brought him to the Sieur Maltrot and their scheme had been partially unfolded.

Again he felt the rude shock to his knuckles, the twisting pain in his elbow since his blow was awkwardly struck. He saw Béager’s head snap to the side and then return, and felt again the strange airy certainty that now, no matter what followed, he would surely die. The dragonfly lifted from the stilling surface of the trough and Toussaint said a silent prayer of thanks to Jesus, that god who softened the hearts of white people. Sometimes softened them. At the same time a verse from his Psalter, not the one he’d read this morning but the one he would be reading three days hence, came unbidden into his mind.

Forsake me not, O God, in mine old age, when I am gray-headed, until I have showed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to all them that are yet for to come
. But this thought made him uneasy; it did not belong in any prayer to Jesus, but was addressed to the angry, powerful God who was his father. It was wrong to invoke the two together, Toussaint felt, and it unsettled him to have done so inadvertently. But a shout from Isaac took his mind away.

Isaac was locked in a tug of war with the black gelding weirdly named Tire-bouchon. The horse had set his feet and Isaac had turned to face him, his teeth gritted, swinging the whole inconsequential weight of his body on the lead, while Tire-bouchon fought the halter with strong rips of his neck that fairly lifted the boy off his feet. Placide was watching from a couple of yards off, holding a brush and a curry comb in either hand.

“You know better,” Toussaint called to Isaac, taking a few steps toward them, but not coming too near. “Don’t face him so, you make him afraid…”

Immediately Isaac relaxed and turned to face forward, eyes just slightly interrogative. The horse stopped lunging but still wouldn’t follow.

“Yes,” Toussaint said. “Take the halter, under the chin. Like that. Don’t jerk him, but pull steady. Now, that will go better.”

Tire-bouchon snorted once, then gave in and followed the child, who led him to a mounting block beside the barn wall. Placide climbed the block and began to comb out the horse’s mane, while Isaac held the halter, his face blank and neutral now, though he was breathing a little hard. Toussaint watched them from the door. Placide was by far the lighter-colored, and it was true he had been born before Toussaint and Suzanne married—still Toussaint knew that many Aradas had that reddish tint. His own father, Giau-Ginou, had had it…So too did Jean-Baptiste, whom Toussaint called his
parrain
. Placide had large and luminous eyes which Toussaint thought resembled his own and he had long thought Placide to be the more intelligent.

He went into the barn and saddled the stallion Bellisarius, a mottled gray, his coat veined like blue cheese. Both boys brightened when they saw him lead the big saddlehorse into the yard. He would not let them use the block to mount. But once Toussaint himself was in the saddle, Placide was able to scramble up behind, clutching at his father’s knees. Bellisarius yawed around as the weight shifted, picking his feet up high, till Toussaint stilled him. Isaac couldn’t manage without help and after a false try or two Toussaint bent and caught his arms and swung him up in front, just before the saddle. Triple-mounted, they rode out of the yard.

On the road that ran between the cane fields, Toussaint pressed his heels lightly into the stallion’s blue-cheese flanks and brought him easily to a canter. Placide’s hands tightened on his hips as the horse picked up speed, hooves clattering on the heat-hardened track. Isaac rocked back against his father’s chest, and tried to hold on to the saddle, but Toussaint unpeeled his fingers one by one and rearranged them on the reins by his own hands, to show him how. It was not long before they had passed the cane fields and crossed the last irrigation ditch that brought water in from Rivière du Haut du Cap.

A half mile farther he pulled the horse up and left the road, guiding Belisarius at a walk over broken ground. Behind him, Placide relaxed his grip as the horse slowed, and let himself sway free of his father’s back, holding himself stable with his knees clamped to the dent of horseflesh just behind the saddle.

“Can I ride him?” Placide said. “Alone, can I ride him alone?”

Toussaint smiled privately, over Isaac’s head, but said nothing for the moment. They had come among the trees, where it was a little cooler under the shade, along the paths which the cattle had worn with their foraging. At any rate the cows had cleared the way enough for them to go through mounted. Placide leaned forward again; Toussaint felt him lay his cheek against his back.

“What do you remember,” Toussaint said, “from the psalm this morning?”

Neither boy answered. Toussaint gave Isaac a prod with his thumb; Isaac squeaked but said no word.

“Do you remember the first psalm from this morning?” There was no sound but the whisper of the horse’s hocks through the underbrush.

“‘They gave me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.’” Placide said suddenly. “What’s gall?”

Toussaint didn’t answer. His bones moved to the rhythm of the stallion’s gait and to the beat of the verses that ran on in his head.
Let their table be made a snare to take themselves withal; and let the things that should have been for their wealth be unto them an occasion of falling. Let their eyes be blinded, that they see not; and ever bow thou down their backs. Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful displeasure take hold of them. Let their habitation be void, and no man to live in their tents
. His lips began to move as he followed the beat of the words with a whisper.

“What is it?” Placide repeated.

“It’s bitter,” Toussaint said.
Let them fall from one wickedness to another, and not come into thy righteousness. Let them be wiped out of the book of the living, and not be written among the righteous…
“It’s the bitter fruit.” Isaac twisted in the saddle, looked up round-eyed at the underside of his father’s jaw.