Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [107]
“Dousman . . .” Marie-Noelle was still supporting him, balancing him by his right arm. He looked at her, confused.
“Té gegne youn espri nan têt-ou,” she said, quietly. Come with me.
She led him toward the trail head, guiding him with the pressureless contact of her hands. He felt the fragile clarity of someone waking from a fever. Everything was lucid, but nothing in his consciousness resolved into the elements of self.
There was a spirit in your head . . .
The dawn was damp, and agreeably cool. Moustique’s knees were a little wobbly, but he felt his strength returning, along with his presence of mind, the farther they went down the trail. Marie-Noelle’s light touch was pleasant, cool fingers just feathering his palm, and her demeanor was pleasant too—as if they’d always stood in this relation, whatever it might be.
Sunrise was baffled by the cover of the trees, but when they came out into the border of the town, the full light struck them and the church bell began to ring. Moustique, returning further to himself, felt a personal jab of panic.
“Oui,” said Marie-Noelle, and thrust the priest’s slop jar, emptied and rinsed, into his hands. “Yes—hurry.”
A fold of her skirt brushed his leg as she turned away. Moustique scurried toward the church, pausing to set the jar down on the threshold of the priest’s house. The congregation had already begun to assemble when he went in, but Delahaye paid him no mind—distracted perhaps by the party of gens de couleur who had already taken their positions in the front benches.
The priest stood before the altar, tall, lean, almost spectral in his best vestments, the ends of his purple stole twitching from a slight rotation of his hips. He spread his large hands over the people below him.
“Dominus vobiscum . . .”
As customary, Moustique led the mumbling response. “Et vobiscum te . . .” He took a darting glance over his shoulder. Marie-Noelle sat on one the rear benches, not far from the hûngan, a small, elderly man with a crown of white hair over a dark face wrinkled like a nut meat. The other back seats were filling with men and women dressed in white, many among them who last night had served the loa.
L’Abbé Delahaye collected herbs and flowers and kept large books in which he sketched the plants, pressed their leaves, and noted down their uses if there were any. A couple of afternoons each week he sent Moustique out to gather plants for him, and encouraged him to talk to people about their value. On this pretext Moustique returned to the bitasyon where the hûnfor was, seeking out the hûngan who, as was usual, doubled as a leaf doctor, doktè-fey.
Moustique had some rudiments of herbal medicine from observation of Toussaint; also his own father had taken some interest in the subject, though less systematically than Delahaye. From the hûngan he learned more, though little enough that was new to the priest. To be sure, Moustique did not report to Delahaye that the hûngan had also begun to teach him the names and natures of the loa, particularly Damballah, the spirit which had chosen to possess him. But in two weeks’ time, Moustique was assisting in the ceremonies at the hûnfor, wearing the white clothes and mouchwa têt of a hounsi, chanting an Ave Maria or a Pater Noster and perhaps some other fragments of memorized Latin scripture, before the African spirits were invoked.
The world of the church and its saints mirrored the world of the hûnfor and the African mysteries, just as (the hûngan explained) the surface world of living people was mirrored by the Island Below Sea, inhabited by souls who had left their bodies: les Morts et les Mystères. Flushed with this new understanding, Moustique felt as if he were empowered to walk on water. His life had come into a delicate balance, unlike anything he had ever known before. He was at peace within himself. Even Delahaye appeared satisfied with Moustique’s newfound calm. If he returned belated, with the slop jar, blinking in the