Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [164]
There was a hazard in visibility, Toussaint thought, to have made oneself remarkable . . . he respected Brisbane, though naturally he also hoped that he would die. Regaining the case, he sat down for a moment on the sill, nudging one of the feisty little dogs aside so as to open his saddlebag. He took out a clean yellow square of madras and tied it over his head. The smell from the cook fire was enticing. Of course, the old woman was not really his grandmother, though he addressed her so and trusted her as if she were. He had other such honorary grann scattered over the country in whose huts he would sometimes award himself a short period of seclusion—no one else quite knowing where he was. With the grandmothers he could also eat without stint or suspicion; theirs was the only food he fully trusted, save what came from the hands of his own wife.
He found some fodder for Bel Argent, then walked barefoot over the packed dirt to the rear of the case and stood inhaling the aromas. The old woman was stirring her iron cauldron while the girl chopped up wrinkled green and orange peppers on a chip of wood—she looked up and smiled shyly to greet him and then looked away. The wind rose up to lift the leaves, and it grew cooler as the clouds rolled in, but it did not really rain; only a few fat drops smacked down before the clouds passed over. They ate outside, crosslegged round the cook fire, using fresh, broad banana leaves as plates. Maïs moulin: cornmeal mush with beans and a little meat with its juices, raised to a high piquancy by the peppers.
They ate seriously and talked little. The old woman did ask after Moustique, though when Toussaint told her he had absconded from Delahaye’s care, she seemed to know about it already.
“Oui, li kouri nan tou morne isit,” she said smiling with evident approval. “Li pale ak tou lespri sa yo epi ak BonDyé tou.”
Toussaint set his banana leaf aside and drew up his knees, responding to inner twinges of annoyance. The marronage of Moustique bothered him more than most, mainly because it embarrassed him before l’Abbé Delahaye. The idea of the boy—running all over these mountains, as the old woman had put it, talking with all the spirits of Africa and also with the Catholic God. He’d heard elsewhere that the boy had left the area and gone north in the direction of Le Cap, but who on earth knew where he might really be? Delahaye would be especially piqued to learn that his charge had carried his smattering of Catholic doctrine to the hûnfors.
He emptied his mind by carefully combing out Bel Argent’s mane and tail and brushing the animal’s white coat till it gleamed obscurely in the light of the crescent moon. This had been his work at Bréda, so long ago, and it soothed him still, as it calmed the horse. But now this agreeable task was almost always done by others.
Sleep came the instant he stretched himself out, resting his head on the supple leather of a saddlebag. Dreams whirled over him like filaments of spider web crossing and recrossing: trails and roads and kalfou and his constant movement, reversing itself like a whiplash cracking back along its braided length, or a snake coiling, striking, recoiling. Here yield, here retreat, feint, parry, flank. Here, make a stand, on the height above Petite Rivière, which Blanc Cassenave had fortified. Below, the brown river folded around the cliff, winding and constricting and, off to the southwest, a blue haze hung over the ocean and Saint Marc.
Toussaint woke, immediately lucid, aware of the writing desk’s hard edges through the saddlebag