Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [321]
Arnaud was happy—one could see his head lift up and his spine unkink itself—because he had expected it all to be destroyed. As for his woman, when she stepped down into the yard, she turned her head around and around like an owl, looking for that shed which was no longer there, and when her eyes found the burned patch where it had been, they rolled back white, and she fell away from herself toward the ground, but Arnaud came quickly and caught her up. The people of that place were watching from the hedges to see if the loa would rise up in her body, but she had only fainted, and Arnaud carried her into the house.
I, Riau, I had not seen the burning of the shed, but I had heard about it from the doctor and also from Flaville, and I knew what was in the shed before it had been burnt.
We stayed at Habitation Arnaud for eight days. As Captain, Riau might have slept in the grand’case with the doctor and the other blancs. Arnaud invited me to sleep there, but I did not want to stay in his house. Bouquart found a case down below the cane mill, and I went there at night to stay with him. In the day, I worked with the doctor and some of the men Arnaud had called in from the cane fields or the mill to help with raising the hospital. His woman Claudine came out then, and took an interest in what we would do; she asked for a brush arbor to be raised next to the room which would be for the hospital, where she might teach the children of those who worked the fields. Arnaud ordered this done to please her. All the time she walked high on her toes like a cat trying to cross water. It appeared that she was meant to stand over the leaf women who would tend the hospital, and the doctor taught her certain things to do. She was slow, but willing when she did these things, and she had a gentle touch. The children were drawn by this softness in her, so that they came willingly to the brush arbor when it was made to learn the letters in her book. Yet I wondered if this gentleness was really her own.
Arnaud thought it wasteful, this business of teaching the children. He said nothing, but his thought showed in the curl of his lip. He was suspicious of the hospital too, and so were the people who worked his fields. In the old days Arnaud had given himself to wounding, not healing. There was no great illness, and no one was badly hurt while we stayed there, but some of the men came to the hospital with the ordinary cuts on their hands and faces from the cane leaves. Claudine and the leaf women poulticed their cuts with gueri trop vite, so that they healed more quickly.
But one day there came to the hospital a runaway who had been caught by the maréchaussée and brought back to Arnaud during slavery time. She was an old woman now, or looked to be so. She did not come right into the hospital, but remained standing at the edge of the bush, with her breasts hanging slack against her ribs and the stumps where her hands were held up before her. Arnaud had cut off her hands as a punishment, when the maréchaussée brought her back to him. There was nothing to be done about it now, so the doctor turned his face to the wall, but Claudine did not look away, and the bolt of pain that passed between them was like thunder.
That handless woman stayed in her case all through her days because she could no longer do anything. Claudine persuaded Arnaud to take a girl out of the cane field to care for her in the daytime. Also she had made a wooden hook and a spoon to be fastened to those stumps, so that the woman could help herself a little. After Claudine had done those things, some of the other people began to meet her eyes more freely when she looked at them, and some of them would shyly touch her hands, although they were still fearful of her spirit.
On the fifth night that we stayed there one of my soldiers forced a woman from the plantation to open her legs for him, and I ordered him to be shot. There was nothing else to do about it. By dawn a great stir had begun among the woman’s family and spread all through Arnaud’s cultivators, and they