Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [358]
“God is relation,” Moustique preached. “God is others. God is love.” He wore a different stole, the doctor noticed, embroidered with awkward, lumpy doves in red. The silver chalice was gone too; it had been replaced by a gourd.
The doctor bowed his head as the sermon went on. He felt the heaviness of his breathing, the darkness of his interrupted sleep. All through the night he had rolled on the wave of the distant drumming, but now he could not remember his dreams.
Moustique raised the circle of cassava above his head and tore it down the middle. He passed his hands over the gourd cup, singing the Latin words of the consecration. Behind him, to his left, a young boy thumped a drum to match his movements. Through the tingling haze of his drowsiness, the doctor moved forward and knelt at the rail to take communion. He glimpsed Claudine kneeling near him, her face shining and running with tears. Then the leathery bread was in his mouth, and Moustique brought the gourd chalice to his lips. The water was heavy, cool and sweet. Moustique put his hand on the doctor’s forehead, applying a quick, firm pressure as he repeated the principal text of his sermon: It is no longer I who live, but the Christ that lives in me.
Next morning the doctor was witness to a scene of tenderness between Claudine and Arnaud as they parted on the wooden gallery of the grand’case. He sat his slightly restless mare and looked at them sidelong and reflected on the ties that bound them. The man’s hand lingered on the woman’s cheek. Then Arnaud turned quickly away and came with rapid steps to his own horse.
They rode out. Arnaud made no further complaint against his conscription; he did not mention it at all, though his face tightened as he surveyed the workers in his cane fields on their way down to the main road. In their earlier conversation the doctor had not found it necessary to make the point that Toussaint, amid all the current turmoil, had suffered a moment of mistrust in his alliances with the old grand blancs. While it was true that capable officers were always in acute demand, it was even more true that Toussaint did not want to leave any one of Arnaud’s class in a position to engage in conspiracies or even raise open revolt behind his lines. The doctor imagined that Arnaud understood all this well enough and that there was no use speaking of it.
Three days later, the two of them had joined Dessalines’s encampment surrounding Jacmel. Despite his first reaction, Arnaud fell into his service with a will. Toussaint had seconded him to Christophe rather than Dessalines, an arrangement he seemed to prefer. As for the doctor, he was kept thoroughly occupied in the hospital tents, for the resistance at Jacmel was desperate in proportion to its hopelessness, and there were many casualties, as Arnaud had predicted.
The morale of the black soldiers was not at its best. Moyse’s notion, that this conflict was a misbegotten war of brother against brother, had caught on among them. Prior to his descent on Jacmel, Dessalines had rallied his troops by night on the plain of Léogane. While the supplies and ammunition were being distributed, stars had begun falling all over the sky, like a rain of burning fire. The men were thrown into terror by the starfall, which they took as an omen that their spirits had turned against them. Also, on the more practical side of the matter, Jacmel was one of the best-fortified towns of the colony, and Beauvais had prepared it well for a siege before he decamped.
Toussaint himself arrived to direct the early phase of the assault. Under heavy fire from the Jacmel forts, he built his own redoubts along the beach, to discourage any relief effort that might come by sea. Then he sent Christophe and Laplume on a night attack against Grand Fort and Fort Tavigne, which lay outside the entrenchments of the Rigaudins. In this engagement, Arnaud distinguished himself by successfully exhorting his men to hold Tavigne, continuing to face fire himself, though wounded