Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [273]
“That my son should be cursed for doing what he has done here,” Madame Fortier was saying. “The evil will come back to him with the same weight. And you, child, to let it be done to yourself . . .”
There was more sadness than anger in her voice when she said this last part. But Nanon did not hear her—her eyes were the eyes of a zombi staring up at the spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling. Madame Fortier lashed herself at Salomon.
“And you? What are you waiting for?—fetch the tools!”
Salomon lifted his arms, stuttering. He already had the hammer and the spike. My hands curved to take them, but Madame Fortier pointed to her man. She wanted him to do this work. I stood in the doorway, watching. Fortier took the tools and braced one knee on the bed, and I watched him set the spike to pound at the rivet, leaning awkwardly to tap with the hammer. He had less skill with the iron than I, but I would not cross Madame Fortier at that moment. She clucked her tongue, then stooped down to hold the edges of the iron ring so the hammer would not slam it so against Nanon’s collarbones. All this time Nanon’s eyes were still and empty like the eyes of a dead person.
Then I heard one of my men calling from outside the house, and I went to see what it was. A white man was coming up the path beside Trou Vilain, he told me. That was not an expected thing, just now in this place, so I went down to the gateway to see what was happening.
Three men were coming on horseback up the trail, leading two donkeys with pack saddles. The blanc in the lead had a broad hat in the Spanish style, so at first I thought he was some Spaniard sneaking across the border, maybe a gold miner. But there was something familiar in his way of riding, and then I recognized the horse, a speckled gray from Thibodet.
Tocquet, the gun runner. The two men with him would be Bazau and Gros-jean, then. I was sure of that, though they were not near enough yet for me to see their faces. When I understood who it was, I smiled inside my head, and I went down from the gateway to meet them.
Since the time he appeared in the camps of Jean-François and Biassou with the guns he brought from Santo Domingo, I liked this blanc Tocquet well enough. For the same reason others did not like him—he was only for himself, and he let you know it. That was simple. Also he treated the people who worked for him well enough, that Bazau had once told me it was no different between them under slavery than it was now.
Tocquet got down from the speckled gray horse and pressed his hands against his hips to stretch his back.
“So, my captain,” he said. “What is your news, and have you got my friend Antoine with you here?”
I told him that the doctor was moving with Toussaint toward Mirebalais, but I had come here, on the army’s way to Banica, because we had heard that this was one of Choufleur’s places. I told them Nanon was staying here, as the doctor would have hoped. But it was hard to say to him, or to anyone, just how it was with her now.
Tocquet took his hat off and slapped it against his thigh, making the dust of the road fly up. The wind pulled at his hair and the ends of his mustache. He squinted at the sky, where the rain was gathering, then tossed the reins of his horse up to Gros-jean and told them to go and make a camp. There were some of my men who knew Bazau and Gros-jean from Habitation Thibodet, so I told them to follow them and make our camp with theirs. Those