Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [374]
“You flatter me,” the doctor said.
“Do you flatter yourself? I know your dislike of the formula, but the union of a quarteronée with a blanc does not produce another quarteroné. Madame Fortier deduces a mixed-blood father. I am impressed with her perspicacity. Moreover, if two children had been born on this day, she would hardly have failed to make note of the second. As you are a master of medical science, it cannot have escaped you that those two children in there are not quite the same age, and that no kinship is apparent between them.”
“Oh,” said the doctor, tilting his head. The birdsong, which had stopped, now resumed again.
“I am satisfied that they are my children,” he said.
“You are.” Tocquet looked at him with a hint of a smile.
“You take what you’re given,” the doctor said. “As they are offered to me, I claim them.”
Tocquet looked as if he would say something, but he did not. He got up and tipped ash from his cheroot over the gallery rail, then came and stood beside the doctor. Again he failed to find a word, but he was smiling openly now. He gave the doctor a couple of heavy pats on his bare shoulder, as one might reward a reliable horse or dog. Speechless still, he went into the house.
The parrot was still roosted on the chair rail, and part of a glass of rum remained on the table near Tocquet’s place. The doctor reached for it and sipped. In the trees, the nightbird went on singing. The parrot stirred, ruffling the feathers of its neck. It turned its head to the right and the left, inspecting the doctor with one eye and then the other.
“M’ap prié pou’w,” the parrot said.
38
The war against the gens de couleur in the south was the bitterest, the angriest, that there had been since the first rising, but I, Riau, I did not own this anger. It was all around me, like the wind before the rain, but it did not blow inside of me. Other men were full of the spirit of rage. That same storm of anger took the colored men also, and threw them against our people like scraps of bagasse on the wind. There was such hate that men would throw down their guns and attack each other hand to hand. For that, some people called it the War of Knives, but as often men would throw the knives away too and fight with nails and teeth. That fight where Dessalines killed Choufleur was not the first of its kind, and not the last one either. But after Aquin no one wanted to listen to Rigaud any more, and the colored men could not call together enough men for a battle. We hunted them across the land like goats.
Sometimes, the war spirit came to Riau’s head—Ogûn-Feraille, with his iron sword flashing points like shells exploding in the sky. It was that way at Grand Goâve, when Ogûn rode the body of Riau into the fighting, so that afterward I did not know what had passed, unless someone told me. That way also at the bridge of Miragoâne—without a spirit in the head a man could not go into that bloody water under the cannon, the slaughter was too frightening. But Riau was not many days in that battle before the doctor called me out to work in the hospital again, and Guiaou also.
After Aquin, after Rigaud ran away on his boat and Toussaint came to Les Cayes, the doctor left very quickly to go north, because he was hungry to find his woman again if he could. Toussaint went north again also, not long after, leaving Dessalines in command of the Grande Anse and all of the Southern Department. Since the army of the colored men was broken, no more of our men were being hurt, or very few. Those who were in the hospitals had either got better or died, so Riau and Guiaou were taken out of the hospital and sent back to the work of killing again.
There still was much killing to be done, and it was ugly work, and I, Riau, did not like it. Rigaud had kept his word in tearing up all the trees and poisoning all the streams everywhere on the Grande Anse where he retreated, and it was for us to paint that desert with another coat of blood of all the men he left behind when