A Rendezvous in Haiti (16 page)

“What—what a long speech,” she said.

“I have plenty to say,” he told her.

On the slopes were many copses, scrawny cedars or luxuriant raintrees bunched in hollows. Blanchard was following a trail of sorts: a goat-path, perhaps. He had dug out a pair of binoculars, and halted often to scan the hillsides. Caroline grew quickly hot and tired, and was pleased when he too squinted uncomfortably at the high sun. “Those raintrees,” he said. “We'll take cover and spread a fine luncheon. Oysters and a cool glass of Chablis.”

Chablis. Well, God knew who or what he was; for the moment, rest and food mattered.

He used the binoculars. “Nobody stirring,” he said. “Haitians are a naturally smart people. No busy-busy in the noonday sun. You notice the drums just quit? And way, way off there,” he pointed, “see that wisp of smoke? Lunchtime, like I said. All of Haiti shucking those oysters and pulling those corks.”

They were well into the cool shaded grove when he halted. He pointed: a round platform only six inches or so off the ground, with gourds and shriveled sour apples and coconut husks and solid little unripe pawpaws lying jumbled, all somewhat eaten away by ants and birds and the ordained scavengers that kept nature clean.

“A Caco shrine,” he said. “Look closer.”

Concealed in higher grass beside the small platform was a flat rock about a yard across. Caroline dismounted. On the rock were a handful of coffee beans, a snippet of red ribbon, a crude knife with a wooden haft, a goat's skull, and a little human head molded of lead, with an aquiline nose and thin lips. It was unquestionably the head of a blanc, and the shrine proclaimed a desire to replace it with the genuine article.

Much subdued, Caroline led her mule away.

They chewed dried goat's meat, mealy breadfruit, and plantain. Like a man-about-town Blanchard mixed her a rum-and-water in his canteen cup, and himself alternated swigs from the two canteens. He began tentatively but gathered speed and anger: “Cold! In winter Quebec is like an ice cap. Fields of snow and ice, a whole province of snow and ice and the sun no more help than a penny candle. Farmers go crazy and kill their wives and children. You slaughter hogs in the autumn because you won't be able to feed 'em, and they hang on their hooks like marble. Can't even butcher till May. So you go on up to Montreal, where you have half a chance, but half doesn't seem enough so you go farther, you cross over to Ottawa, and then you're
really
a nigger. A Frenchman can walk in and he's a goddam prince and goes to every soirée in town, but a French Canadian swabs out the toilets in some government office.”

“Even with two languages?” This
was
a picnic; she was drowsy. The pistol lay heavy in her lap.

“Haw! Anybody else, people be glad to hire him. Not a French Canadian. Damn British! Damn Americans! Call us Canucks. Goddam Canada'd be another goddam Scottish desert without us, kirk and work and skinny women. Well.” He swigged deeper. “Maybe I would never have amounted to much. My father was a pig farmer and country butcher and I can read and write and figure but not much more, except kill. This is his knife. I can take a man's head off with it. He gave it to me when I went to war.”

“You were in France.”

“Yeh. They told me I wouldn't have to go overseas. That was September in fourteen. I was in England by October and France by February. You know what Wipers is?”

“Yes. Ypres, the town in Belgium. The battles.”

“Three of 'em. The first one was around October, November in fourteen so I missed that. But I am one of the few men alive who went through Wipers Two
and
Wipers Three, and I tell you we are
doomed
. I
know
that. Just about the time we finish dividing up the world, we'll finish killing each other off. Some pygmies come along in about five hundred years and scratch their heads and wonder.”

“But it's over,” she said reasonably.

“Oh boy,” he said. “Are you smart! These Haitians know: they don't want any part of your boy friend.”

“He was in France too.”

“Oh yes. The Marines have landed. Did I ever tell you I met your father?”

“You met my …”

“Yeh. Goddam parade. Officers, a band.” He snorted, and his face fell sullen. He slugged at his clairin.

Caroline said carefully, “I've heard your cough before. I'm sorry.”

“You're smarter than I thought,” he said. His eyes smoldered. “Yeh. I was with the Canadian Division. We were right in the middle of that Second Wipers. It was April fifteen. The bloody Hun, we were already calling him that, the bloody Hun used chlorine gas against the 2d and 3d Canadian brigades. We went crazy. We tried everything. Kerchiefs dipped in water. A lot of good that did. Smells like hell, thank God, so we had warning. We tried to hold our ground and some of us did but Christ that gas rolled in. There was a lot of Africans in the line too, I remember, Zouaves and maybe some Senegalese, three battalions I think, and they just looked around at each other and said ‘Jesus Christ, the white man' and they ran, and it's what I should have done too. Us niggers got to stick together. Those poor goddam exiles, left their women and their sunshine for a dollar a day to come and rot in the bloody rain in Belgium and this great thick smoke kills them by the barrel.”

“It wasn't only you.” Caroline was angry: Bobby was scarred, might have died. “There were thousands of brave men who didn't quit the human race.”

“Hell, yes!” he fired back. “You want figures? I'll never forget 'em. Second Wipers: casualties: two thousand one hundred fifty officers, fifty-seven thousand other ranks. Dead: ten thousand five hundred. Just to go back and forth over a mile of useless ground and maybe level a few buildings seven or eight hundred years old. That's not counting cattle and old women who got in the way. Those ten thousand five hundred sure quit the human race.”

And now he had begun, there was no end to it. They rode on; he talked away. “All the smart ones died. The smart tommies because they didn't know a damn thing about war, and the smart lieutenants because it was the honorable thing to do when you had family and were supposed to run the world.” They were riding from copse to copse, and in the valleys more smoke rose, and they saw a river; time quickened. And still he talked, his voice low. “Everybody good got killed. They made a feast for the rats—fat, slimy rats and those beady eyes shining at you in the rain. That's what tore my guts out, that and the gas. All the strong ones and all the smart ones, and who the hell is left in charge?
Millions
, lady!
Ten fucking million!
You understand me? On both sides; blow off their heads and they all look alike. Canadians, English, French, Russians, Italians, and Austria-Hungary or whatever and those Serbos, and Aussies and New Zealanders and Gurkhas—
Gurkhas
, the best fucking fighters in the world but there is no way to use even a Gurkha when machine guns can crossfire. That's why the Haitians have won. It may take a generation but they've already won. They won it in Europe. And the Chinese and the Japanese and the Hindus have won. And I'm on their side. You understand now?”

For a moment she simply could not speak. “My father—”

“Yeh! Your father!”

“—once said that it was as if we were sorry we ever gave up human sacrifice; as if we were afraid we'd offended the gods, and had to revive it every few years to be sure who we were.”

“Your father said that?”

She nodded.

“That's pretty good,” he said. “I sure sacrificed my share. Anyway they put me in hospital and let me cough for a while, and fed me up. I was still dizzy and still coughing when they reclassified me for light duty, so I was an officer's batman in 1916, and he was stitched across so they gave me to another one, but I knew what ‘light duty' meant: it meant that when they ran short of meat they'd send me up to the line. Which they did in the spring of seventeen. I was a corporal then. And the first thing that happened was, we won a great battle. It was someplace called Messines and the generals were all laughing and popping champagne, and we took seven thousand prisoners. I was guarding a line of them, scrawniest goddam Boche you ever saw, and one of them started to cough and for all I know he's still coughing, and that started me to coughing and we just looked at each other, we knew what it was all right, and we didn't say a word but we were asking each other, this German just about my age, skinny as a rail, we were asking each other why we let these fuckers do it to us. He had crown princes and dukes sitting in clubs, his Wilhelms and Ottos, and I had French and Haig, generals and field marshals. All leather chairs and tobacco pipes, and britches and shiny boots, and us poor sons of bitches—Jesus Christ, woman! The whole goddam Europe is gone, you understand? Your boy friend won't win here because he can't. The white man is
finished
, and he finished
himself
.”

His saddle creaked, and horse and mule reeked pleasantly in the humid afternoon air. Caroline was calm, a nurse again: some of this she had heard before, some of it she had understood. And now she wondered if her world had in truth vanished, if Bobby's career and her father's conference, if horse farms and shipyards, if famine in China and the women's vote, were only illusory scraps and remnants, grace notes to stave off, for a few bars more, the end of the great dance of history; if they were all plunging even now down time's chute into a black void.

And yet as he railed he became more human; she wanted to embrace him like a sister and to murmur, “It will all end well.” She turned in the saddle to see his face. His eyes were not cold now, but burned; he was glaring in fury at his past. Abruptly they went blank, and he whispered, “Hush! Stop!”

They drew rein; she listened.

“Into the trees! Quick!”

They sought the densest scrub, dismounted, tethered the horse and mule. “You stay by me and do what I say,” he whispered.

She had seen nothing, heard only the hot sigh and crackle of a tropical forest.

He led her forward until the brush thinned. They lay side by side looking out over the slope and the trail they had just left, and now she saw: perhaps half a mile to the south, rounding the morne, a small parade, a line of men, only four but their gait oddly regular. Field hands did not march in close order; for an insane moment her mind said
patrol!
, and for another insane moment she was sorry.

Not four: five. The four were marching in lock step like men shackled together. Each had laid a hand on the shoulder of the man before him; only the leader's arms dangled. Ambling along behind was a foreman in white trousers, and now she heard what Blanchard must have heard long before: the foreman seemed to be singing, or counting cadence.

She turned to Blanchard. Their faces were close; neither spoke. Her hand clutched the revolver: when had she drawn it?

Then he said, “Zombies. Big fellows. Redskin haircuts like the dockers in Gonaïves, or Martel.”

“Port-au-Prince too,” she said. She lay breathless in the heat, the summery fragrance of the grassy earth they lay on. Zombies!—she was a girl again, frightened and excited, and here was a pistol in her hand, and a boy beside her. One, two, one, two, and the foreman chanting, and the sun slanting off the green morne, and the smell of Blanchard's khaki and Blanchard's sweat. An exhilaration rose in Caroline, of Haiti and herself all compound, of magic and mystery, of fear and love, of Blanchard and Bobby; for one impossible stupefying tick of time she was a goddess.

“The Marines are afraid of them,” Blanchard murmured. “The Marines don't want to fight dead men, because you cannot kill dead men.”

“They're not dead,” Caroline said.

“No. I know them. They live where we're going.”

“Be glad they weren't Cacos,” he said, when they were riding again, “and for God's sake keep your eyes open.”

“You were telling me about the end of the world.”

“Important news. That pistol.”

“Yes?”

“When did you draw it?”

“I don't remember. When—I think when I dismounted.”

“Pretty good,” he said. “On n'est pas fille du colonel pour rien.”

“Ni Canuck,” she said.

He pondered that. “Pretty smart, too.”

“The end of the world,” she reminded him.

“Yes. There was a hell of a lot of us wiped out, Canuck or not. We attacked all summer, one attack after another. You were in the war by then and we figured it would end. Some day it would end. All those Colonel Barbours would come over with all those divisions, all those men with blond hair, six foot two, two hundred pounds, drive a railroad spike with one hand, and clean up those Huns in two weeks. Oh, the rumors! The Russians would reinforce and attack. The Italians would reinforce and attack. Meanwhile I was a machine-gunner and they were starting to call it the third battle of Wipers. I remember for a few weeks I even felt
good
. I would kill some people and cough a while and tell myself we were winning. I might have killed a thousand men. You realize that? A thousand men? Over and over, over and over, five here and then there with the machine gun, and I had a dozen feeders killed—you know what a feeder—yeh—but I wasn't even scratched. I was with the Second Canadian Division then. Poor bastards.”

“Hold up a minute,” he said. “We need a drink. I talk too much.”

“I never heard a man talk that way,” Caroline said. “They tell me what great men they are or how beautiful I am but they never show me how they hurt.”

“Water only,” Blanchard said. “No rum till we bivouac.”

“They say water has no taste; but it takes on the taste of the day.”

“I can still taste French water,” he said, “in the form of mud. That fall it rained forever.”

“I remember.”

“You were there.”