Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [235]
Reaching the hilltop, the old man stopped and gasped and pressed his clawed arthritic hand against his heart. The wind whipped his long white hair out from his head. Arnaud waited for him to catch his breath before he spoke.
“I am astonished to see you here,” he said, releasing his wife to move toward the newcomer. “Delighted too, of course.”
The two men embraced, then held each other at arm’s length. De Libertat’s crippled hand flopped ineffectually against Arnaud’s coat sleeve. Then the old man turned and bowed to Claudine, who curtsied in reply.
“And when did you return?” Claudine inquired. Her period of lucidity was sustaining itself, Arnaud noted.
“Oh, I have been here for quite some time—but quietly, you know, at Bréda.” De Libertat looked about with his pale blue eyes. “At first it seemed unwise to appear in the town.” His expression clouded slightly. “Perhaps it is still unwise.”
“Would that Commissioner Sonthonax were such a friend to ourselves as he is to the blacks.” What Arnaud really wanted know was whether Bréda was again producing sugar—such rich land, far better than his own—but he hesitated to ask directly. Commending himself to patience, he took his wife’s hand back on his arm.
Doctor Hébert was looking up at the three crosses, hands on his hips and his short beard jutting.
“How came this church here?” Arnaud said, turning to De Libertat.
The old man turned his working hand palm upward. “Abandoned by the Jesuits,” he said.
They looked at the church, a white board rectangle, raised on a stone foundation high enough to require five wooden steps to the door. On the peaked roof was balanced a small square belfry. As they watched, the bell began to ring.
“Vespers,” the doctor said. “Allons-y?”
They strolled together toward the church steps, Arnaud in the rear, Claudine depending on his arm, her head demurely lowered. To their left, the long seed pods of the flame tree shivered in the wind. Together they mounted the steps to the church. Arnaud felt a certain heaviness; regularity of religious observance was not natural to him. He glanced down at the curve of her cheek—pleased to remind himself how the little weight she had recently gained had partly erased the harsh lines that had marked her gaunt face these last years. She looked younger. Confused by his fugitive emotion, Arnaud caressed the back of the hand which lay so lightly on his inner forearm.
The congregation was small: only the children Claudine had been instructing, the woman Fontelle, who was mother to the older colored girls, and a few blacks from the bitasyon on the knoll behind the church. Though the room was half empty, the white party settled on a puncheon bench to the rear. Near the sanctuary, a waist-high drum spoke in a slow, guttural tone. Arnaud started. In his experience, the drums portended unrest, sometimes attack. But this drum’s voice was slow and sonorous as a processional phrase from a pipe organ.
Moustique walked into the sanctuary from a side door, bearing a silver chalice before him like a grail. He wore a long, off-white vestment fashioned roughly from a sheet, but the stole round his neck looked authentic.
“See how she beams,” the doctor whispered, aiming his beard’s point at Fontelle. “The mother of a priest.”
Arnaud nodded, glancing at the turbaned mulattress, who did indeed have a very large smile spread over her long jaw. That twinge of feeling touched him again. He recalled again how, when his feet were torn and bloody from walking the roads barefoot from Ouanaminthe, Fontelle had poulticed and bandaged them, so that they could carry him farther from the mortal danger. He took his wife’s right hand, the whole one, in his left and pressed it.
Moustique set the chalice on a wooden table covered with a bluish cloth. He stepped in front of this makeshift altar to address the congregation.
“Que l’Esprit Saint soit avec vous.”
The children answered