Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [137]
Well, it was true that I had left all these things behind when first I ran from Toussaint’s army to go to Bahoruco. True also that I had no shoes now and no shirt either, only a straw hat and the macoute strapped on my shoulder and canvas breeches torn in rags almost to the hip. I knew where the thought in Moyse’s head was leading him, toward the crime of deserting and the punishment. I had no thought inside my head, but my hands went into the macoute to hold one pistol by the barrel and the other by the grip. I held the pistols toward Moyse that way.
Moyse pushed back in his chair, and his hands fell below the table. I did not know what he would do, but just then something pushed me softly in the back and when I turned it was the horse Ti Bonhomme, now nosing at the macoute where he knew the bag of salt was hidden.
“Sé chaval-ou?” Moyse said. It’s your horse? But I thought Moyse must know Ti Bonhomme from Bréda anyway.
“Li égaré,” I said. He has strayed.
Moyse began to laugh, his hands rising open into my sight again, and I was laughing with him then.
“Well, keep him,” Moyse said. “Ride him.” This time, when he stopped laughing, the smile stayed.
Then I felt foolish to have left the saddle at Bonnet d’Evêque, if the horse meant to follow me so far anyway. But Jean-François was at Grande Rivière and we at Dondon had many little fights with his people, so in one of these I took a leather saddle, and another horse too. Moyse found a coat for me to wear and I put the watch in a coat pocket where it ticked beneath the cloth, and people began to call me Captain again as they had done before I went away to Bahoruco. Soon Captain Riau had a little troop of men to order in the way the whiteman Maillart had taught him before.
All during this time Toussaint was fighting with most of his men in the Artibonite plain, or back and forth across the river all the way to Mirebalais. He had made a strong camp at the plantation of Marchand where Dessalines was born, in the pass of the Cahos mountains, and from there he attacked Saint Marc many times, but could not take it, or hold it if he did. He did cross the river to take Verrettes, but the Spanish came from the east to help the British take it back again. The British whiteman Brisbane was also a clever general, so for a long time it did not seem that either he or Toussaint could beat the other one completely, there in the Artibonite.
All this we knew from letters which passed from Toussaint to Moyse and back again, because Toussaint’s fighting was far away to the south then. To the north and the east was Jean-François, who had more men than Moyse at Dondon, but not so well ordered or wisely led. Jean-François had money, gold from the Spanish to pay anyone who would come over into his army, and some people from the camps Toussaint had around Dondon did go over to Jean-François, or they would change sides daily, depending. Anyway, the French whitemen with Laveaux, who was Toussaint’s commander and parrain now, had not money to pay anyone, or even enough of powder and bullets, so we had to take those things from our enemies whenever we could take them.
One day, Toussaint rode into Dondon with more than three thousand of his men, and no letter coming before to say that he would be there. That was Toussaint’s way, and Moyse and everyone at Dondon was happy to be surprised by him like that, except Riau was not so happy because when Toussaint saw that I was there, he had six men arrest me and lock me into a room with no windows, in the strongest house of all Dondon. I did not have any time to look for Moyse or anyone else I knew, and no one spoke to me when they were chasing me to the guard house in front of the bayonets, but I heard myself called the deserter Riau, so I thought I would probably be shot the next day.
Every one must die, we know. Riau knew this, and told it to himself, but was frightened still,