Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [356]
She passed the cane mill and turned in the opposite direction from Arnaud’s new distillery. The odor of burned sugar and rum gave her a momentary pang, but the breeze turned and carried the smell away from her. She went through a screen of mango and corrosol trees to the place where the rows of slave cabins had once stood. Most of them were now marked only by a few scraps of charred, decaying board amid squares of ash overgrown by new greenery. Small lizards were busy everywhere in these ruins. Those of the former slaves who still remained on the plantation had raised new ajoupas on the borders of gardens they’d cleared for their own benefit. Of the few little cases that had been rebuilt here, Fontelle and her children now occupied the nearest.
Moustique slept in the open air, apart from his sisters, on a pallet of leaves in the shelter of a lean-to roof against the rear wall of the case. Claudine inspected him for a moment, as she had studied the sleeping form of her husband. Moustique took his rest more calmly than Arnaud. His face was milk-colored, with the faintest tinge of coffee. There was but small trace of the blunt, rounded features of the Père Bonne-chance; he had the long nose and long jaw of his mother.
When she knelt to set the cup and stole beside the pallet, Moustique’s eyes came quietly open. His gaze took in the objects, then expanded to include Claudine. He sat up and gathered his knees in his arms, leaning against the wattled wall of the case. If he’d been startled, he did not show it, but there was a question in his eyes.
“A gift for the church,” Claudine began. She settled herself on the ground, crossing her legs under her calico skirt. She lifted the stole and unfolded the ribbon of fabric across her lap.
“This I sewed for you myself,” she said, with a hint of shyness.
Moustique reached out his forefinger and touched the embroidered pattern of doves descending, scarlet on a white background.
“I am not a good seamstress,” Claudine said. “Often I prick myself with the needle. I am sorry for those brown flecks, but they are marks of blood.”
“Your work is very fine,” Moustique said. He lifted the gourd cup and peered into the fibrous windings of its interior.
“When the spirit is present,” Claudine said, “one has no need of precious metal.”
Moustique set down the gourd and looked at her inquiringly.
“With these things you may replace the stole and the silver chalice, which ought to be returned to l’Abbé Delahaye.”
Moustique cast his eyes down, looking at her bare feet and the pale film of dust which covered them. Claudine drew her legs in farther, so that her feet were hidden in the pool of her long skirt.
“How to begin . . .” she said. “What do you remember of your father?”
Moustique bowed his head, then raised it, his eyes full of pain.
“Yes,” she told me. “I was there too. I saw how he suffered. But there was more.”
Moustique lifted the gourd cup again and stared into the bottom of it. “He was kind,” he said. “Indulgent, careless—even my mother complained of that. If something or someone outraged him, his anger could be terrible. But to us he was always kind.”
“And to me as well,” Claudine said. “He gave me absolution and brought the grace of the Holy Spirit to heal the disorder of my mind. You must understand, I had done the unforgivable. Wherever I looked, I saw burning.”
With his two hands, Moustique drew the gourd cup against his breastbone and looked at her across the rim of it.
“You must know, he was an innocent,” she went on. “When they broke him on the wheel, his blood washed away my agony.” She raised her left thumb, pricked and swollen from her clumsiness with the needle. “Do you not see? Through bloodshed it is to be washed clean and through fire it will be purified.”
Moustique’s eyes narrowed. “When Baron mounts upon your head, he says that it must be for four hundred years.”
“So many have told me,” Claudine said. “But we do not know where