A Rendezvous in Haiti (17 page)

“Before my father.”

“You're proud of that.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Did your bit.”

“Yes,” she answered. “Do you want me to be ashamed of it?”

“No,” he said. “It was all a bloody costume party but there's nothing to be ashamed of. For colonels on down there's nothing to be ashamed of.”

He scanned the hillsides; they rode on; he was silent for a long stretch, as if the well were filling again. “I haven't coughed,” he said. “Sometimes I just think about those days and I cough. We ambushed a bunch of your boys a while back and I was certain I would cough. Lay there like an iron man holding it back.”

“Don't tell me that. Tell me more about France.”

“Belgium, remember? Poor little Belgium. Hell, I don't know. Maybe they deserved it. They killed about fifteen million niggers in the Congo. Anyway, it rained. The rain. Rain started to fall toward the end of October, and it was real rain, like the flood in the Bible, the whole battlefield, the whole damn country, a swamp, barrage and heavy rain and barrage and heavy rain and you could hardly take two steps. Mud jammed every goddam thing, every rifle and every machine gun, and if you threw a grenade it just made a noise like a duck and flung mud. I heard even the shelling was no use, nothing would
blast
, only explode mud. Well, that wasn't so true. I found out the hard way. It was
all
the hard way that week. The Germans used gas again. This time it was mustard gas. That smells like new-mown hay but we knew there was no new-mown hay in all that rain and mud, plenty of new-mown soldiers but no hay. We had the masks by then. I was scared: one more little whiff of gas, any gas, and that was it for old Blanchard. Jesus, I was scared. And then I was too busy to be scared or anything else. I was killing plenty of Germans again, I'll never know how many, and I don't care. After a while it was automatic, I might have been firing in my sleep, and what happened was, I forgot to retreat. They read out the citation later and it said, ‘With his loader held a salient for four hours and so on, enabling B Company to withdraw from crossfire and so on, and return to the attack on Passchendaele village.' We said ‘Passiondale' and I couldn't even spell it. I didn't even know B company were there. And then came a lot of poetry about valor and beyond the call of duty and all that.

“That was my last day, sometime the first week in November. We crawled through the mud and the rain and the barrage and it was like living in a swamp, what do you call it, amphibious, and sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was shooting at—ours? Theirs? The French?

“And then I was hit. There was a great blast and I was floating. It felt like I was just drifting up there about a hundred feet, and I was deaf. I remember the quiet. And all of a sudden I was eating mud and there were six or eight of us sitting around, almost in a circle like, and one was French because there was a French helmet in the mud, also some German helmets with the spike sticking up on top like some little tree about to grow.

“But these people were in bad shape. You listen now, Miss Barbour, Miss colonel's daughter, Miss society girl. Some of them were just trunks. There was an arm, a foot, and several heads bashed and one in mint condition. But all these bodies were
sitting
. They were holding a meeting, or maybe waiting for a hot meal, and some of them had no heads and no arms and one of them was just a pair of legs. Then I saw a whole body. It was whole except the blast had popped it open. So the head and the shoulders and the hips and the feet were all attached, but the belly was open like a fresh flower, but it wasn't fresh and it was all shit-brown. And then there was that one fine head. It sat right up in the mud like a cabbage, but it was a head all right and complete. Hair, eyes, teeth, everything but eyeglasses, and there was some neck too, because it was wearing a necklace. I patted myself all over and took inventory and I was all there, and I said, ‘Hello, my friends. Mes amis, meine Freunde.' They just sat there. After I while I crawled over to inspect that necklace, and it was all British insignia—regimental badges and buttons and officers' pips and some rings. Gold rings from fingers. Goddam Boche stole from corpses.

“I vomited for about half an hour, and coughed up my guts. There was about every part of the male human body on display like a butcher shop. Then I passed out. Our people took the village and a burial detail found me next day. I had a bad cold. Not even pneumonia. All that, and I caught cold. And I'm going to shut up now. I'm tired of talking and I'm tired of Martel and your goddam Marines and I'm even tired of you. Don't say one goddam word until we have a rum in our hand. And keep your eyes open.”

When the bloodshot western sky faded to pinks and purples, he led her into a gully and over the far lip to a grove of mahogany watered by a rivulet. They made camp without speaking, and when they were secure a silent Blanchard measured rum.

Caroline said, “May I ask a question?”

He nodded.

“Have you a family here?”

He nodded again, and said, “Very fine woman in town, and a younger woman in the village.”

“Two.”

“No need to hide them,” he said. “Haiti is all right. Men and women both, no need to sneak around and tell a lot of lies and call it cinq a sept. Here you go. Don't spill.”

“Here's to valor,” she said.

“Yeh,” he said.

“What sort of medal did they give you?”

“Never mind that,” he said. “I was so goddam ruined I never even got it till January, and that was the last straw, that little bit of ribbon, that was the end, I left next day and never looked back. I bought civilian clothes and walked south. I'm a Frenchie so the farmers took me on their wagons—hell of a lot they cared if I was a deserter, they knew their country was finished, sold, bleeding to death. This was nineteen-eighteen, remember.
Four years
of killing.”

“Less than two years ago,” she said. “You're still killing.”

“It's my trade now,” he said. “The only one I know. South of Bordeaux they didn't care a damn about the war—they were selling everything they could grow, at good wartime prices. They lost sons, they cared about that, and they cursed all those great men and treated me right. I had some money on me, my pay that there was no good way to spend and some that I won gambling, so I bought a carte d'identité and went over the mountains with smugglers and there I was a Frenchman on vacation in Spain. For some reason the Spaniards were rude to the French so I crossed over into Portugal, fine country, and found a map of the world and made up my mind: warm, French-speaking, and no more lords of the world. No more white folks. Africa was too big. Haiti looked good and then I heard there was a bonus: I could find employment. I found it. I like it. And here we are.”

“Here we are,” she repeated. “And where are we going?”

“A village,” he said. “We'll be there soon.”

“Soon!”

“Yes. And listen: in Martel's village you're my woman. For your own good.”

“But you have one.”

“Well then I'll have two.”

“But you're selling me.”

“Shut up,” he said. “That was then. This is now.”

“We can run for it,” she said. “We can make it to the Marines. We can—”

“Shut up,” he said.

Sleep came hard: tomorrow! Louis Paul Blanchard. With his lungs and his bad dreams. A waste! With his sombrero and his slaughtering knife. With his easy manner and his man's ways, and the deep lesion, yet the truth of him too. And he would sell her or take her—yet here she lay with his pistol. Shoot him tonight?

And then? Go where? Shoot every stranger until only one cartridge remained?

In the moonlight he lay, eyes open; she saw the rise and fall of his chest. No. She would not shoot Blanchard. What did his friends call him? Lou? Frenchie?

But of course: he had no friends.

In the night his kiss awoke her, and she was all sleep and love, dream and desire, and she clung to his face and drank deeply of the kiss; heat surged, and her breasts yearned, ached, and then she panicked and chose to be clever and to flee, drowsily murmuring, “Bobby!”

Blanchard said, “Liar.”

9

Scarron and McAllister rode without conversation that first morning. Crossing the open plain they heard drums chatter and watched muggy cloud scud slowly in from the southeast. McAllister worried about the priest, and glanced across to be sure that Scarron was not seated badly, or keeping too taut a rein, or sweating uncomfortably. Scarron detected those motherly concerns, and rode with nonchalant grace. These troopers were more amenable than Irish hunters.

Shortly they were riding through rain, less together than ever, as if McAllister's broad-brimmed olive-drab campaign hat and Scarron's broad-brimmed weathered straw hat marked two small independent territories. The plain was unsheltered but grassy, and they were spared bogs and quicksands. McAllister urged the pace, but the priest ignored him, and the lieutenant was forced to slow.

The wind backed, the rain slacked, and soon the skies were brighter. They approached the foothills, and McAllister led them to a brooklet, where they dismounted and stretched, and tore hungrily at ham sandwiches, and made small talk, pausing often to heed the garrulous drums.

“Your derrière hurt?”

“Not at all. I've hunted, you know.”

“Not in a cassock.”

“A soutane.”

“What's the difference?”

“None, really. Soutane in French. Listen: it occurred to me: will that Wyatt come searching? It would not help.”

“No. Healy will warn him off. We're on our own.”

They were gazing out over the plain, a fine prospect, some green gleaming now as the sun burned through, and patches of stunted maize, and the hills beyond; and the miraculous frigate birds, miles inland, soaring free, above all earthly sorrow. The drums beat more lazily, but rested seldom.

McAllister said, “Tell me about Martel. Who he is and what he is and so forth.”

Scarron said, “Tell me about Healy.”

McAllister observed the frigate birds. Man-o'-war birds. “What is it you want to know?”

“He was exhilarated, and found work for you. What was it?”

McAllister swigged at his canteen, then topped it off in the brooklet.

Scarron said, “Will you tell me?”

McAllister said, “Yes. I'll tell you.” He replaced his canteen in its cloth case and sat comfortably, crossing his legs Indian-fashion. Scarron brushed at crumbs. McAllister went on, “He ordered me to kill Martel if I could.”

“Would you do it?”

McAllister said, “And be cut down on the spot? He was only creating a mission, for the record.”

“Would you do it?”

McAllister said, “Do you sometimes feel that you're living in two worlds and don't quite believe in either of them?”

Scarron said, “Constantly.”

“Failing that, he said I must bring back intelligence. Do you want his exact words?”

“Captain Healy's exact words are worth hearing.”

“He said, ‘I'm not sending you after any girl, is that clear?' Any girl! Then he said, ‘You better come back with
something
or they'll have my ass. And for Christ's sake do come back.'”

Scarron said, “Amen. Would you do it?”

McAllister looked him in the eye and said, “Trust me.”

Scarron said, “Trust you! When I can't trust myself? I came very close to violating the secrecy of the confessional.”

“And a damn good thing!” McAllister said. “Does your God want her out there,” and his voice rose a notch, “tied up and beaten, or raped?”

“We never know what God wants.”

“Save that for Sunday school,” McAllister said. He collected the debris of their picnic.

“Look at me, man,” Scarron said. “I am a black Haitian priest doing white man's dirty work.”

“Stop whining, Father. Let's move on. You're black,” and McAllister's impatience ran off with him, “and so is Martel, and so's His Excellency in Port-au-Prince. You're not doing white man's dirty work: if Healy's right you're helping us hunt down a mad white man. Oh, what the hell, Father, nobody makes war on women and children!” They rose and approached the horses. “I'll be just as frank and tell you I wouldn't care who won if we could bring my girl out safe, and I wouldn't care even then except that I am a Marine and under orders. Tell you the truth, I don't believe there's a man in my outfit gives a damn who runs Haiti, or wouldn't fight just as hard if our orders were to back Martel.”

“You'll meet him soon,” Scarron said. “Tell him that.”

“I may do just that,” McAllister said. “Now tell me about him.”

Scarron obliged him as they rode, sketching the boy and painting the man in vivid oils. Charlemagne Masséna Martel stood six feet three, weighed two hundred pounds, was coal-black and shaved his head but for a hedge down the middle in the old Dahomeyan manner. He wore cotton trousers narrow in the leg and his muscular thighs bulged. Sometimes he wore a loose cotton shirt with a neckerchief, a red-and-white American bandanna, and when he was not barefoot he wore wooden clogs with a thong.

He had been arrested in the summer of 1918 and sentenced to five years' hard labor for complicity in a Caco raid on a gendarmerie outside Hinche. He did not admit his complicity; he affirmed it. He had become an outlaw to fight slavery, which was now called the corvée and consisted of forced labor on the roads, only a few days each year but forced, and the period sometimes extended without notice, the labor in lieu of taxes and other charges, some reasonable but most not. At any rate it was the Americans who enforced the corvée; how could a free Haitian tolerate that?

Because he was literate and fiery, and had studied with the white Jesuits, and had once visited France, he was set to street-sweeping in Cap-Haïtien on the northern coast, with an armed policeman on guard at all times. This was to humiliate him. The authorities, including various Excellencies in Port-au-Prince, were sharply opposed by a canny and dangerous politician in the north called Fleury who was Martel's friend; they assumed that the townspeople would mock the prisoner and through him Fleury. Rumor urged the citizens to dump their garbage in Martel's path.