Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [181]
While they were talking, Claudine, still dressed in her striped silk, had begun to approach the well, a wooden yoke across her shoulders, balancing two large wooden pails. Guiaou trailed a little distance behind her.
“Surely you know Claudine Arnaud,” said the captain. He took the doctor’s forearm and drew him to the other side of the tree.
Claudine came to the well, lowered a bucket and began with great effort to draw it up. Guiaou moved to help her, but she thrust him away and went on straining at the winch alone.
“She takes water to the men in the cane fields,” the captain explained. “I have heard of this, but never before seen it. In her derangement, she fancies it a penance.”
The doctor stroked a thumb along his jawline. “I don’t know if I call it so deranged,” he said musingly. “Why should we not help her?”
“But as you see, she will accept no help.”
Indeed, Claudine had rejected Guiaou’s overtures once again. She took up the loaded yoke with no assistance and, the tendons straining from her neck and her face pouring sweat, began to stagger forward.
“Well, but let me try,” the doctor said.
Cat-footed, he slipped to her left side and hooked his fingers round the handle of the bucket, lifting only enough to take half the weight. Claudine corrected her balance, but otherwise seemed to take no notice. The doctor looked over his shoulder at Maillart, who hurried to follow his example on her opposite side. Harnessed together in this way, and still with Guiaou following behind them, they went to offer water to the workers in the fields.
19
All that time that I, Riau, traveled with the doctor looking for Nanon, I could not stop thinking of Merbillay. The reason was the doctor, himself, and how the thought of the woman who had gone away from him was always large and heavy in his mind. The thought of his lost son came into his head each day to grieve him, too. He did not speak about it, but Riau could feel his thoughts whenever I was near him. And we were always together then, not only in the searching, but in the fighting too.
Sometimes Riau wondered what would happen if we found Nanon and Choufleur together, because the mother of Choufleur was right. Choufleur would have happily killed the doctor as soon as he saw him coming up the road toward the house where they stayed. Or maybe he would wait and kill him more slowly, so that the doctor would be made to know just who was killing him, and why. Choufleur was that kind of man, I knew. Sometimes I wondered how that might be. The doctor himself was as skilled with pistol or long gun as any white man I had ever seen. His skill was like a sorcery sometimes, but his spirit was not attached to killing men.
But if Choufleur was really at Vallière, then he was safe from us, because the doctor and Riau became knotted up in all the fighting before we found any way to go to that place. There in the valley of Grande Rivière was the biggest fighting Riau had ever seen, and for more days. Each day was to rise before dawn and go out climbing the hills and shooting and hacking at enemy men until it was night, like a long day of cutting down cane in the fields of some plantation.
In the first days of that fighting it was Captain Riau leading his men to each fight, mostly the taking of little camps on the peaks or the notches of the mountains above the big river. Some of these camps were easily taken, but as the days went on the fighting was more bitter, and Captain Riau began to see his men shot down to death on either side of him. This gave me another sadness, because I, their captain, could not save them from this death. Baron took them, though they stood at my right hand, and they went down beneath the waters.
Most of us had forgotten