Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [228]
A few raindrops spattered into the dust behind us as she came in, and a few more flattened on the palm thatch of the roof. She was a long time unwinding that red spangled cloth from her head. We did not speak of anything at all. With the heaviness of rain, the air between us was like water, so that each of her movements made a swirl that touched my body, though we were not yet near enough to touch.
After, a shaft of sun came through the scattering sounds and made the shape of a flattened circle all in green and gold over a few small carrés of cane field in the valley. Merbillay and I looked down at this together, feeling a calm and a stillness between us. All the time she kept inside the doorway though, and I felt how she did not want to be seen by anyone, and a little seed of anger was somewhere in my head, though not yet opened.
After this day, Merbillay came to me sometimes, without warning and without a word. I would not know when she was coming, and still I could not go to her. Each time she came, the hot, sharp sweetness was stronger than the time before.
In the next days the doctor’s sister returned. She had gone away in the darkness riding in man’s trousers and all alone, but when she came back, she was riding sidesaddle like a regular white lady and escorted by five of Toussaint’s ninety new guardsmen with the tall, shiny helmets, and with her was the boy, Paul. Then there was a lot of happiness in the grand’case, and Zabeth shouted and cried in joy, and soon the story of all that happened came out to us in the camp through Bouquart—how Elise was in harmony with her brother again because she had found the child (though they had not found Nanon at all) and how Choufleur had wanted to sell the boy, to make him disappear.
I, Riau, was glad for the people in the grand’case, because I was in friendship with the doctor since a long time. Also I had watched Sophie with a different eye since Zabeth had called me to her treatment. Even after the fever left her, she had been pale and sad, like a ghost, but now the light returned to her eye, when she saw her mother and Paul again. Pauline, who was the daughter of that marron priest and Fontelle, had come with them too, to help Zabeth with the little children . . . but they were more like three or four small children, laughing and playing together.
But it was not finished yet, because they had not found Nanon anywhere. That doctor did not have the proud ways or the manner of other blancs —he was so much another way that you might fail to see him when he was there, but when he had once set his teeth into something, he would not let go very easily, no more than a big caïman from the river. I knew this, and I pictured him with the mirror ouanga he kept in one pocket and the snuffbox ouanga he kept in another pocket far away as if it would be like gunpowder and fire if he and Choufleur ever met, and I saw that in the end they must come together. Their story was not finished yet, and neither was mine.
I saw before my eyes a newborn baby stuck on a long spear, with arms and legs still wriggling, though it must soon die. By the force of pity you wished for it to die soon to end its suffering and end the suffering you felt when you had to look at it that way. And yet I, Riau, had looked at sights like that with another feeling. In the time of the first risings, Riau had done certain things, or certain things had been done with his body which I did not now remember, either because he was ridden by a lwa or . . .
Choufleur must have wanted to wipe out that boy, Paul. To make it like he had never been born. I felt that this must be the truth. But the blancs had been the first to put babies on spears, before the risings, when they rode against the colored people of the