Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [311]
“Do you pray?” Moustique looked at him significantly. The doctor realized his lips must have been moving to shape the thoughts in his mind.
“Rarely,” he said.
Moustique nodded. “It is good to pray.”
Irked by his assurance, the doctor said, “But you also bow to heathen gods. Do you not fear hell and damnation?” He jutted his beard toward the bell rope which hung just within the open door of the church.
“No,” said Moustique. “There is no such difficulty.” He leaned toward the doctor and looked at him with strangely clear eyes. “God is above all but He makes Himself manifest in the body of Christ. So too the loa are manifest when they mount the heads of their serviteurs. BonDyé cannot object to this, because He made it so.”
The doctor’s initial annoyance evaporated. He felt the seamless-ness of Moustique’s belief. Where had the boy got this absolute confidence? Certainly he had not possessed it when Toussaint delivered him to the Abbé Delahaye. Moustique had always seemed the opposite of his father, frail and nervous and too quick to emotion and confusion, despite—or perhaps because of—his intelligence. The Père Bonne-chance had been heavy, ursine, low to the ground and solidly settled there. The mosquito versus the agouti . . . But now Moustique had changed; he seemed inspired . . . inspirited. It was also true that the people of this place, whatever gods they venerated, had taken Paul in with unquestioning kindness. They had taken in Claudine Arnaud.
“Yes,” said Moustique. “That is lespri Ginen, which is very much the same as Christian love and charity.”
This time the doctor was quite certain that he had not mumbled the slightest whisper of his thought. The boy must be a mind reader if not a lip reader.
“If you live in the spirit,” Moustique said, “you are not under the law.”
The wind freshened from the bay. The doctor felt a shadow pass over him, though there was none.
“Father,” he said, experimentally. No, it was too ridiculous, to address this stripling so, with his stolen garment and his patchwork of beliefs. Potent enough to get a child on a black maid—well, and what of it? But if it had been the Père Bonne-chance in his place, the doctor knew that he could have continued without hesitation.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Moustique turned toward him, adjusting his stole, twisting his shoulders to block part of the wind. The doctor edged a little closer.
“It has been long since my last confession.” Yes, years. The doctor was not especially devout, not usually, though lately he’d been moved to more frequent public observance by the dictates of Toussaint.
“I have fornicated, innumerable times, but with the same woman always. Almost always. But certainly outside the bond of marriage.” But he did not feel this to be his sin. He closed his yes. “I have killed other men, in acts of war, out of a selfish concern for the preservation of my own life.”
This was not his true sin either, though it saddened him to think about it. He felt the wind on his face and his closed eyelids, felt Moustique attentively waiting.
“I cherished resentment against my sister,” he said, “who had done me wrong, it is true . . . but my forgiveness still was slow, even after she had done all she could to repair the harm.”
Moustique murmured something not quite intelligible. The doctor felt a faint lightening, as if a pebble had been tweezed from the mountain which bore him down. The sun was red on the back of his eyelids. At the center, a whorl of darkness.
“I have been guilty of despair,” he heard himself say. There, that was it. “In despair, I have conceived the intention to slay a man who believes himself my enemy.”
He opened his eyes.
“Ego te absolvo.” Moustique pronounced the formula without tremendous conviction. “But if you would go in peace, you must free yourself of this intention. This, I think, you have not yet done. There is something which prevents you.