Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [56]
“I—well, to begin, I always had a respect for Laveaux, and a liking to boot.”
“And I also, to the small extent I knew him.”
“And at bottom I suppose I am a Frenchman first, before . . .” Maillart grunted. The picture of himself emerging from the warehouse with a shovel of horse manure entered his mind. “Au diable. I don’t suppose I know what I am anymore. I find this country damnably confusing.”
There was a louder shout from the yard, and a thump of solid impact. Both men stood and moved nearer the window. Outside the sergeant was doubled over with his hands clasping his midsection, while the mule wheeled free, trailing its lead rope, rolling its eyes malevolently.
“After all, you look like you’ve been through the wars.” O’Farrel looked at Maillart with a certain sympathy.
“At least I recognize myself as a soldier still,” Maillart said. “I am expected to go through wars.”
O’Farrel laughed and clapped him on the back. “But you must come to dinner, at least.” He gave the captain the address of a house in the town.
A little after seven in the evening, as the light shaded orange over the sea and the windward passage, Maillart stood with Major O’Farrel in the garden of a small stone house on the Grande Rue. Earlier in the afternoon he had gone to bathe in the river, and afterward changed into his last clean shirt, carefully conserved for such an occasion: a loose blouse of natural-colored, nubby cotton, the sort of thing worn by planters up the country, or by Xavier Tocquet. Maillart wondered passingly where Tocquet might have got to by this time. When he glanced down at his own sleeve, he realized that he was growing accustomed to seeing himself without the cloth or insignia of anyone else’s army. Perhaps in the end he would be content to become the soldier of his own fortune . . .
A black servant appeared, to offer them glasses of rum from a tray, and when they had accepted told them that their host expected to join them shortly. Maillart sipped and turned to admire the garden, lush with hibiscus and bougainvillea and peculiar orchids he had never seen before. Water had been brought into the enclosure from the canal in the street and branched to irrigate all the plantings and to fill both a small pool covered with water lilies and a larger basin with steps leading into it, large enough to fit two men.
“Monsieur Monot is an Acadian, did you know?” O’Farrel asked. “There were a great many who came here thirty years ago, after the English had expelled them from Acadia. But as you see the land is next to worthless here, never mind the merits of the harbor, and the climate did not much agree with them after the cold of North America. Most have gone to Louisiana now, even Monot’s own sons, but he has stayed and, as you see, not done so badly for himself. But here he is.”
A little man came out of the house, bald, stooped but spry, dressed in an antique manner. He took Maillart’s hand and greeted him, smiling. His eyes were pale blue, under bushy shelf-like eyebrows, with long hairs dangling at the corners like the ends of a mustache. When the servant offered the tray, Monot declined the rum in favor of a glass of grapefruit juice.
Maillart complimented him on the garden and the cunning fashion of its irrigation.
“Yes,” said Monot, with enthusiasm. “And you see, the water runs from this basin here”—he indicated the bathing pool—“and out the back, but come and I’ll show you.”
They followed the rivulet of water through a gate to the kitchen garden at the rear of the house. Here Monot or his minions produced potatoes, peas, herbs, “even haricots verts,” as the host declared with some pride.
“Tout pousse,” Monot said, a glitter in his eye. “Everything grows, and marvelously, once one brings water to it.” The artichokes of the locality, he went on, were perfectly delectable . . .
They returned through the arched gateway to the flower garden. A couple was just coming out of the house: a small dark-haired woman on the arm of a stocky man.
“Ma belle.” M. Monot straightened perceptibly and