Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [90]
Henri forced himself to eat slowly. So as not to burn his mouth, or choke. To make it last longer too, of course. He thought of the cassava he had used to eat (with luck) during his campaigns with Soulouque’s army. Cassava kept better and one could march longer on a smaller amount of that bread. But these light hot biscuits were very, very good. Henri was near weeping with joy as he ate his portion and he saw the other men were too. Only Jeffrey Forrest, waltzing the woman he held tight in his arms to the thin droning tune the Old Ones sustained, seemed unaware of the feast before them. Even the woman he held had tilted her weight toward Jerry’s pan, her soft eyes melting toward a few crumbs that remained there.
“Look here,” Little said suddenly. “Something is wrong with this biscuit, Jerry. Look, my jawbone goes right through it.”
Jerry wouldn’t look at him. Hunkered over the dying fire, he was scouring his iron skillet with white ash. “Listen at the haint fussen bout a biscuit,” Jerry said “Haint, you lucky to be getten biscuit at all.”
“But …” Little’s faintly transparent lips were trembling. He put the biscuit into his mouth and bit at it savagely, but the biscuit reappeared whole and unharmed in his palm beneath the point of his jaw.
Nath Boone choked, covered his mouth with his huge calloused hand, and scooted away from Little on the log.
“They ain’t nothen wrong with my biscuit,” Jerry said. “Sompn wrong with you.”
AFTER THE MEAL, while the others slept, Henri circled the top of the knoll like a dog following a fence round a yard. The fog that swirled around his knees was yellowish and smelled of burnt gunpowder. It seemed that the bloodstained river wrapped all around this hilltop now, and it also seemed to Henri that the water was rising. Wagons and guns and mules and men were getting sucked down in the bloody stream, where at first there was shouting and crashing and the concussion of gunfire, but as the water rose further it all grew quiet and corpses and wreckage revolved in silence.
By the hollow tree, Kelley hunkered over his heels, gazing intently at a space of packed earth between his knees. His mouth moved silently, Henri could see. He might have been praying. He might have been talking to himself in Chinese. Henri turned back to his view of the river, studying how bundles of blood-thread unraveled in the water without exactly ever dissolving.
“Blood on the moon,” Kelley said, bracing his hands to the small of his back and stretching from his long hunker on the ground. “Or to put it more clearly, the sun became black as a sack of goat hair, and the moon became as blood.”
Henri looked at him. There was no moon. It was daylight, after a fashion—the damp misty no-time and no-place of this hilltop. Kelley looked at him still, in rather a friendly fashion.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that story you told.”
Henri studied him until he understood what he must be talking about.
“That was no story,” he said. “That was the truth.”
“Ah,” Kelley said. From a grubby handkerchief he unfurled a fragile pair of spectacles which he settled fastidiously onto his nose. He looked into the palm of his empty hand as though something were printed there. “I once had read something of your Tuissant le Overture,” he said. “It seems to me that he must have died—oh, around the turn of the last century.”
Henri watched him. Kelley furled his spectacles back into the cloth and tucked them cautiously into his breast pocket.
“This proposition that you’re his son,” he said. “Why, you’d have to be sixty-five years old, Henri! At the very least. And I’d scarce take you for forty.”
“You people think you know what time is because you invented watches,” Henri said.
Kelley put a finger on his lower lip and appeared to be thinking this last remark over. Henri got a grip on himself. “A man may get a child in other ways than with blood and spunk,” he said. “A man may have a son of his spirit.”
Kelley dropped his hand from his face and looked at Henri with fresh interest.
“A child of God, you may call yourself,