All Souls' Rising (28 page)

The drumbeat turned still more shallow, dry as the whisper of dead leaves. The white man had been comatose, but under this new stimulation he enjoyed a remarkable return to life. He hugged the tree and tried to climb it, but Chacha Godard twisted his arms away and a black man tied his wrists behind him with long strips of liana. The white man hung, kicking his feet against the tree trunk. His chest and belly grumbled with a suffocated scream, but his own weight sealed his throat shut so it could not escape. Above, the rounded leaves of almond tree fanned him gently.

“You must have these monstrosities stopped immediately,” said the Sieur Maltrot. His tone was customarily crisp, though he kept his voice low. His eyes cut from the hooked man to the suspended planter, who had died a couple of hours previously and was just beginning to stiffen where he hung.

“Be careful,” Choufleur said. “You’re not master here.”

“I believe that was a friend of mine,” Maltrot said, looking at the planter’s blotchy face with an evident fascination. “Or an acquaintance, rather.”

Jeannot was whispering something to Chacha Godard, who signaled for his assistants to reverse the ladder on which the second man was strapped, so that he hung upside down. Godard knelt at his side, his short knife drawn. The white man’s eyes rolled toward the blade and then away. Jeannot was kneeling also, holding out an odd round cup or drinking bowl, which had a curious mass of tendrils dangling from it, as if it had been rooted in the ground…. Maltrot saw that the bowl was in fact a scooped-out cranium, with a dried scalp clinging to its underside, and the trailing hair. As he made this recognition, Godard jerked a short deep cut in the white man’s neck as one might bleed a hog. Blood gushed over the edges of the skull and matted the hair where it hung beneath and spilled over to darken the gold braid on the cuffs of Jeannot’s coat. Jeannot stood up ceremoniously, holding the brimming skull out from himself like a chalice. He looked at the man hooked to the tree as if he meant to propose a toast to him.

“How good it is,” Jeannot pronounced, “how sweet—the blood of the white people.” He raised the skull to his lips and drank, blood running from the corners of his mouth and separating into threads as it mingled with the oil on the bare skin of his chest. Maltrot hiccuped and looked away, toward the scarecrow of a priest who sat behind a sort of bench, watching the proceedings with a rapt attention. Then he looked at Choufleur’s freckled profile.

“It isn’t that such things occur,” he said. “It’s that you permit them to be shown to me.”

Choufleur did not react, and Maltrot waited. Waiting, he drew out his snuffbox, took his dip and sneezed. A few of the black men gathered around looked at him curiously.

“A certain decorum ought to be maintained,” Maltrot said. “But you have fractured it. I meant to say as well that instructions appear to have been exceeded quite drastically all around.”

Choufleur broke from his reverie, and gave Maltrot a distant look.

“Come with me,” he said. “They’ve finished here.”

As he turned moving toward the edge of the central compound, he made a covert movement with his hand, and a group of five black men began following them at a little distance. They walked a way in silence, climbing through the terraced coffee trees.

“Who was that devil of a priest?” the Sieur Maltrot inquired. He paused, resting with one hand on his hip. His face was lightly broken out with sweat. Choufleur looked back at him noncommitally and climbed ahead.

They entered a trail that passed through the jungle and wound toward the bluff above the river. It was cool and shady under the thick-laced forest roof, and all around was the damp smell of leaf mold. A macaw flicked across the way ahead of them. Maltrot looked back, and saw that the five men were still following them, two dozen paces back.

“Who are those fellows?” he called to Choufleur. “Have they no work?”

“They work as they are ordered,” Choufleur said, without turning. His back receded on the trail, a shifting patch of white on the dense green.

Maltrot shrugged and kept following him. They came out together on the bluff’s edge, where the sound of the water rushing downriver reached them much more clearly. The river turned through coffee trees planted almost to its edge. It was a pleasant vista, on the whole. At the bend of the river, a party of the men who’d assisted Godard were dumping dismembered parts of bodies into the water.

“
Nous sommes arrivés
,” Choufleur said. He stood on the balls of his feet, beneath a tree lurid with red flowers whose stamens lolled from the blooms like tongues.

“
Arrivés où?
” said the Sieur Maltrot.

“
Á la fin du monde
,” Choufleur said. “
Tu comprends ça?
”

Maltrot swung at him with his stick, but Choufleur caught the end of it with an even quicker movement. Maltrot let him try his strength for a minute or more. They set themselves against each other, Choufleur straining to twist the stick out of his grip. Then Maltrot released the catch and whipped free the blade, leaving Choufleur unbalanced, holding the empty wooden sheath. He might have skewered the mulatto then, but instead he only grazed the sword’s point across his cheek.

“Was that your game?” Maltrot said. “
Tu oses me tutoyer, toi?
Get down, ungrateful cur, and beg my pardon.”

Choufleur stepped out of the blade’s reach and touched the butt of a pistol stuck in his belt.

“Is that it?” Maltrot said. “Shoot, then. I’d welcome it—compared to what I’ve seen.”

Choufleur winked. A black arm wrapped across Maltrot’s neck; his arms were pinned by several hands. He’d forgotten the men on the trail behind, and now they’d overtaken him. The hands were peeling his grip from the sword stick, finger by finger. Choufleur moved near him, and Maltrot kicked him neatly in the groin. Choufleur gasped and dropped into a crouch, gagging from the pain. But Maltrot could not get free of the other men. The sword stick was taken from him. The black men tied him carefully into the heart of the blooming tree.

“Enough,” Choufleur said. “Go now.”

The black men retreated down the trail. Choufleur approached the flowering tree, with a mincing step from his injured groin. Maltrot wriggled his fingers; it was the most that he could do. They’d tied his legs below the knee so that he could not kick again.

Choufleur reached into Maltrot’s vest pocket, took out the snuffbox and wrinkled his nose at the powder inside. He poured the snuff out on the ground and put the box in his own trousers pocket.

Maltrot’s face had turned quite gray. “You must remember,” he began, in a level, formal tone. “I’ve shown you every consideration, every generosity. I gave you education, sent you off to Paris, sparing no expense. I’ve given you land and slaves of your own.”

Choufleur drew a knife from his belt and ran his tongue along the blade. Maltrot choked.

“I am your father,” he said flatly.

“Do you acknowledge it?” Choufleur said.

“Yes,” Maltrot said. “
Yes
—and publicly, if you like.”

“If it is true,” Choufleur said, “then you gave me a nigger to be my mother.”

He cut a bracelet all around Maltrot’s wrist, just above the thong that bound it to the branch. He made a vertical incision into the palm and turned back the flaps of skin from the whitish fatty layer underneath and began peeling it back toward the fingertips as if he were slowly taking off a glove. Maltrot ground his teeth and bit his lips till the blood ran freely, but finally he could not contain the scream and when it came it was large and loud enough to split the sky.

D
OCTOR
H
ÉBERT
was coming upriver along the bluffs from Biassou’s encampment, in the company or custody of a black man he’d come to know as Jean-Pic. In his pocket was a safe conduct in the name of Biassou. It was Toussaint, however, who’d signed Biassou’s name to the paper—a curious instrument, the doctor thought, for none of the people who challenged him in his perigrinations could read it. And yet in every case where he was required to produce it, the document would be scrutinized (upside down or sideways like as not) and its talismanic significance acknowledged. He would pass. He was, as had been said of certain privileged slaves,
liberté de savane
—meaning that he was at liberty to go more or less where he liked, but without being truly free. The constant presence of Jean-Pic or someone like him also served as both protection and restraint.

With Jean-Pic he had been crisscrossing the bluff trail, making little ventures into the surrounding jungle to collect medicinal herbs Toussaint had taught him to recognize, and also other plants which were unknown to him and which he believed Toussaint might identify. The black man had a skill with medicinal herbs, some of which he’d used to poultice and soak the doctor’s hurt ankle. Doctor Hébert was not entirely certain of their efficacy but he had recovered most of his mobility with good speed.

He was just reaching into a cluster of bamboo to pluck a section of a climbing vine with fragrant trefoil leaves and small white star-shaped flowers when the air all around him was cleaved by a scream. It was not precisely an unfamiliar sound; the doctor had grown somewhat accustomed to hearing it at some distance upriver from Biassou’s camp. But now it seemed to be just at his feet. He thought that he must have strayed nearer than he should have to Jeannot’s encampment, or perhaps Jean-Pic had lured him here deliberately, and this idea frightened him. But he saw that Jean-Pic was as startled as he, was parting the fronds of bamboo with great caution so that he could look down on what was happening below.

The doctor stepped up softly and looked over Jean-Pic’s shoulder. At the bamboo’s edge there was an abrupt drop of some fifteen feet, and below, the blooming tree. The doctor noticed the tree first, its flowers such a fresh and vegetable red that all the blood seemed flat and dull beside them. He was aware of the rank bloody smell. There was a man, two men, one operating upon the other with a concentrated and scientific precision.

The doctor had seen this sight before, or something like it, and indeed his own position on a height above reminded him all the more strongly of the operating theaters of his training, where he had learned anatomy. With the difference that here the subject was screamingly alive. The epidermis had been peeled away strategically to reveal the workings of the musculature on the hands and arms and thighs; even the cheeks were laid bare, and the lips had been cut away (so that the man must scream without a proper mouth to do it with). Two tendons had been severed, so that the large muscles of the thigh hung down below the trembling genitalia, and above these, an incision had been made into the body cavity. The operator pulled out the mass of intestines, straightened out the kinks in them and let them drop. He reached within and laid his curious hand on the liver, the spleen, the palpitating heart.

The operator was a mulatto, oddly freckled—the doctor felt he’d seen him somewhere before. The subject, on the other hand, was skinless now, deracinated, transmogrified into the internal self he possibly had always been, raw human nature laid bare to greasy viscera and a scream. The doctor had seen the assembly of these parts oftentimes before in his own chilly dissections—but this was life itself. Unconsciously he mutilated the vine he’d plucked between his fingers; new fragrance rose from the crushed leaves. He felt through his nausea and terror that he was witnessing something well beyond torture or murder. Though he could not understand or grasp it, he was seeing what it meant to be human. This was a sincere inquiry into the nature of man, not how a man is made and how his parts cooperate, but what a man
is
, in his essence, and who, in the final analysis, would be allowed to be one.

Chapter Eighteen

W
HEN DAWN’S LIGHT FIRST BEGAN TO RISE
, the priest was once again revealed, a pace or two ahead of the staggering Arnaud, the pale skin of his back looking speckled under its mat of bristles, his hairy buttocks jiggling with his steps. The road they were taking passed between cane fields that had been put to the torch and because of the smoke the morning light was unusually slow to penetrate. When they once could see each other plainly, the priest stopped and resumed his damp brown habit. Arnaud sat down and pulled off his riding boots. His feet were covered with watery blisters from rubbing against the wet leather, and as they walked on the blisters tore open and he saw that he was leaving dim smudges of blood on the dust with every step. He would have liked to moan or weep but before the barefoot priest he was ashamed to.

The two huts of the priest’s compound were as silent and deserted looking as they’d been when Arnaud had passed that way with his pack train the afternoon before. But when Père Bonne-chance swung open the door of his
ajoupa
, Arnaud saw over his shoulder that his family had returned there, the mulattress Fontelle sitting motionless on a stool and an indeterminate number of children huddled along the wall behind her, all quiet as kittens or puppies surprised in a warm den. The children looked at Arnaud speechlessly, their eyes shining. Père Bonne-chance pushed the other stool toward him and he collapsed onto it helplessly.

Arnaud was face to face with the mulatto woman, who regarded him, as crisply still as a snake. The light coming in through the cracks in the palmiste wall laid grayish stripes along her turban and her cheek. Her nose was long and crooked and her teeth were snaggly in her lantern jaw, but with his connoisseur’s eye Arnaud discerned that she was also high-breasted and slender, though full in the hips, and he recognized that the priest had a good thing in her, at least in this wise. Using his hands, he lifted one of his feet to the opposite knee, and now he finally did groan aloud, more from the revolting appearance of the blood-encrusted sores than from the pain itself, to which he’d partly become inured.

Fontelle reached out and took his ankle and raised the foot onto her lap. She looked at the sole of it critically, twisting the ankle this way and that. At her short command one of the children went out with a clay jug and returned with it full of river water. When Fontelle lifted his other foot to her knees, Arnaud was unbalanced on the stool and his head and shoulders went lolling back against the fragile wall. The woman washed his feet one after the other and packed them in a poultice of crushed aloe leaves. At her first touches a weird sensation shot through the marrow of Arnaud’s bones, first an exquisite pain and then a soporific numbness. His face turned against the slats of the wall and he gave up his consciousness.

When he awoke it was night and the room was redolent with a green soup thickened and sweetened with coconut, which Fontelle was ladling into bowls. Arnaud accepted his portion and ate it wordlessly as the others; no one spoke. He lay down on the floor and slept again. Sometime during the night he woke to find that one of the little boys had rolled against him in his sleep. Arnaud let him remain there, smelling the sour-sweet odor of his breath; the child’s arm shivered against his ribs in the nervousness of some dream. On the opposite side of the
ajoupa
the priest was snoring loudly. Arnaud thought of his wife by her name, Claudine, and wondered what their lives might have become if she had borne him any children. When he next came to himself it was dawn again and Fontelle was shaking him by the shoulder.

He got up with less pain than he’d expected and followed the woman out of doors. While he slept she had bundled his feet into makeshift moccasins made of rags, and his steps brought him no more than a dull discomfort through this padding. He walked behind Fontelle who walked behind the priest. The children followed them like a string of chicks or ducklings, each carrying a pack of clothes or a couple of gourds or cooking pans. Arnaud had been given a pack himself, with his riding boots tied across the top of it. When they had walked a mile or so, he asked Père Bonne-chance where they were bound, and when the priest asked if there were anywhere he wished to go, Arnaud said that he would like if possible to return to his own plantation.

Because of the children their pace was slow, and Arnaud, with his tender feet, was grateful for its languor. He watched the priest’s bare toes splaying out over the gravel of the roadbed with as much amazement as if he were watching someone walk on water. The first night they stopped in the provision ground of a plantation that had been sacked. The provisions had been looted too but not completely, and Fontelle found a stalk of good bananas and sent the children to dig dasheen. They roasted bananas in their skins over an open fire and ate without conversation and slept and in the morning they rose and went on.

The way they took led through a stand of coconut trees with the ground between them razed and burned—not to destroy them this time but only to clear the undergrowth. The priest gathered coconuts and husked them where they were and gave a pair to each child to carry. In leaving the grove they came upon a starveling milk cow trailing a lead rope and the children ran after her, but the cow bellowed and bolted and would not be caught.

They were crossing open country, dry flats never yet scored with irrigation ditches. Behind them the green tufts of the coconuts receded and in the farther distance the mountains beyond the River Massacre had gone ghostly in the distance, under the purpling clouds that crowned their heights. Ahead was more jungle, then mountains again, a lower range but steep enough. They reached the tree line before night and made a camp, where they supped on coconut milk and slices of the meat. In the plump darkness Arnaud slept uneasily, waking to pinch at mosquitoes or to listen to the low liquid calling of the
siffleur montagne
. Next morning he rose with the others and they continued their way.

The land was full of small roving bands of rebel slaves, and often the priest and his companions had to leave the road to avoid them. In the heat of each afternoon they rested under cover, and when the heat had abated in the evening, they came out of the jungle to walk a couple of miles more. They changed course so many times to keep away from the brigands that soon they had departed from any way familiar to Arnaud. By the third day he had lost all sense of their position in the country.

The third night they spent in a banana grove above a small stream that ran along the edge of a burned cane field. In the early morning of the twelfth day the priest went down to the stream for water and came back hurriedly, his face leaching alarm.

“What is it?” Arnaud said.

His viscera clenched and then went watery, as if he didn’t need to ask. But the priest beckoned him to the grove’s ragged edge and pressed on his shoulder so that he knelt, the priest crouching beside him. A half mile distant a dull cloud of ash had been raised on the incinerated plain by the feet of a hundred or more blacks coming their way. An indistinct mass, they moved in quick rushes broken by sudden halts; when they stopped they shouted loudly to the devils they worshiped and thrust makeshift spears into the air above their heads. A large man in their forefront swung a bull’s tail around his head, snapping it like a whip to urge them on.

“They saw me when I went to the stream,” Père Bonne-chance muttered. Arnaud watched the blacks advancing, half mesmerized by the odd rhythm of their stops and starts.

“You must go on alone,” the priest said. “If you cross this mountain you will find your own place in the plain on the far side.”

“I would not leave you,” Arnaud said, surprised to feel that what he said was true.

“Well, they have seen me,” the priest said. “We could not outrun them in the mountains with the children. Or without them for that matter, I expect…”

Arnaud hesitated. The blacks were near enough now so he could pick out individual forms among them. They were singing, chanting rather.

“What do they say?” he asked the priest, as if he would know better.

“
Vodûn
,” the priest said. “Never mind—I have a better
vodûn
of my own. No doubt I’ve baptised some of them, besides—on more than one occasion.
Je saurai comment ménager tout ça
.”

Arnaud kept staring. His mouth hung slackly open; the inner membranes had gone dry.

“You must go quickly,” the priest said, without moving or raising his voice. “As you are a
grand blanc
they will certainly murder you, and I think it will go worse with the rest of us if they find us together.”

Arnaud stood up abruptly and followed the priest back to the blackened circle of last night’s campfire. Fontelle had already detached his boots from the bundle he’d been carrying, and one of the children was stuffing the uppers of them with bananas and some of the tubers they’d dug the night before. Arnaud pinched the boot tops closed and swung them together over his shoulder. The priest accompanied him a few paces into the jungle.

“You have only to go up that way.” Père Bonne-chance waved indiscriminately at a mass of bamboo laced together with vine. “And down the other side…”

Arnaud, all unsure of his intentions, dropped onto one knee. He took hold of the priest’s thick spade-shaped hand and began kissing the hair-matted backs of his fingers. “Father,” he said. He repeated the word. In the stiffening of his wrist he felt the priest’s embarrassment. Père Bonne-chance pulled his hand free and laid it on Arnaud’s head, but he said nothing. After a moment he touched Arnaud with both his hands, rubbing his ears as he might a hound’s. Then he broke the contact and swung away, back to where Fontelle and the children were waiting.

Arnaud began climbing but it was impossible to make much haste. His feet were healed considerably, but the unwieldy moccasin-bundles gave him no traction on the difficult slope. He zigzagged, of necessity, there was no other way. The noise of his own poor progress alarmed him and he stopped, hearing the sound of many feet splashing through the stream below.

In the place where he had halted there was a break in the jungle cover and Arnaud overlooked the grove. The priest and his family were seated on their haunches some thirty yards below, breakfasting on dasheen and fruit as if unaware of the shouts and pounding feet approaching them. The leader flung into the clearing, his bull’s tail brandished at arm’s length. Père Bonne-chance looked at him in the manner of a host receiving an invited guest.

“The Lord be with you,” the priest said. He picked up a banana and broke the peel and offered it. The leader’s hand loosened and the bull’s tail slipped slackly from it.

Arnaud began climbing again, holding his boots in one hand and clinging to bamboo and saplings to support himself with the other. He went as quietly as he could, abandoning any attempt at speed. The priest’s voice carried well in the humid air, and Arnaud heard him repeating the same phrase, each time another man reached him he supposed:
Domine vobiscum
, as if he were confident of a response according to the litany.

At dusk of that day Arnaud crossed the mountain’s backbone somewhere short of the peak and made it a little distance down the other side before nightfall stopped him. He groped dasheen and bananas from his boot and ate in the heavy dark. The rattle of a stream through a gorge somewhere below was a torment to him, for he had not thought to make his way to water, and now he was afraid to climb down in the dark, knowing he might fall and break a leg, if not his neck. The image of the horse he’d so wantonly destroyed on the mountain was present to his mind; in dream he saw the animal as it would look now, swollen with the death-bloat and legs stiffly projecting from its foul belly. Sometime during the night it rained a little and he could lick some moisture from the leaves. When the rain had stopped the
siffleur montagne
took up its mournful song again, but tonight it irritated Arnaud more than it soothed him.

The descent was slower and more arduous than the climb, though he began it early. Near noon he came unexpectedly into a clearing, a bare trodden area circling a single peeled tree trunk at its center. Painted on the stripped wood were images of two serpents entwined together and nearby on the ground there lay a broken gourd strung with cracked clay beads: a rattle abandoned by the dancers who’d been here. It occurred to Arnaud that this must be where his own slaves came for their
calendas
, though weeds were sprouting from the track and it seemed no one had been there for some time.

In twenty minutes more he’d cleared the jungle and could see. All the fields that had been his cane were burned to nothing. In his compound, only one hut remained standing, a row of vultures perching on the rooftree. He went down toward it. The citrus hedge had been scorched but not consumed. Arnaud plucked a shriveled orange and ate it for its juice.

His stone cane mill had been broken down by hammers, as it looked. Standing in the litter of smashed vats, Arnaud was aghast at the sheer labor this destruction must have taken. Three of the walls had been battered to rubble, and about half of the fourth was still standing, lianas working their tendrils into cracks in the mortar. His stable and the
grand’case
, which were built of wood, had both been burned to the ground. The only surviving building was the shed where he had kept his dog. Arnaud walked toward it with a dragging step.

The door was open—from it issued a vague putrid smell. This odor had drawn the vultures, undoubtedly. Arnaud stooped and picked up a stick of charcoal and whipped it side-arm at the three who sat on the roof, but the vultures only shifted their feet and looked back at him. He stopped at the threshold and peered in.

Vultures and insects had done most of the work. It was a skeleton that hung from the wall, clothed in rags and a few strips of rotten desiccated flesh, its bone wrists casually aloft in loose loops of cord. And yet it moved, or something moved about it. Arnaud squinted into the dim. A metallic sectioned thing with many legs came crawling out of one eyehole and crept into the other.