Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [84]
The doctor clicked his tongue, withdrawing the rag from the wound. The smoothness of this discourse was truly astonishing. He touched with a fingernail a bit of shrapnel embedded in the wound. Toussaint seemed to raise his voice slightly.
“But a somewhat belated experience opened my eyes to these perfidious protectors and, having taken note of their scoundrel’s deceitfulness, I clearly perceived that their intention was to make us slit each other’s throats so that our numbers would be reduced, and to load our remnant with chains and tumble us back into our former slavery. No, they will never arrive at their infamous goal, and we will in our turn avenge ourselves on these beings, who are contemptible in every respect. Let us unite forever, and, forgetting the past, concern ourselves only, from now on, with avenging ourselves in detail upon our perfidious neighbors.”
Well, this passage was plausible enough, despite the inflated language; it was certainly true that the Spanish commitment to liberating the slaves of Saint Domingue was insincere, and (even without the discoveries at Biassou’s camp) no one could have failed to notice that the Spanish part of the island had remained a slave state . . . The doctor flexed his left thumb and forefinger like a set of pincers. At his nod, Guiaou shifted two of the lamps a little nearer. Having lost his forceps in some accident of war, the doctor had grown out and filed the nails of those two digits to replace them. With this homemade instrument and the knife blade he began to dig out bits of the scrap metal from the British grape.
“It is absolutely certain that the national flag flies at Gonaives as well as all the surrounding area, and that I have chased the Spanish and the émigrés from the area of Gonaives, but my heart is shipwrecked by the event which overtook some unfortunate whites who were victims in that affair. I am not like so many others who can watch scenes of horror in cold blood; I have always had humanity to share, and I groan whenever I cannot prevent evil.”
Again the statement was more accurate in principle than in precise point of fact, the doctor reflected as he probed the wound—to be sure, Toussaint had himself ordered the execution of at least some of those “unfortunate whites” who had perished during the taking of Gonaives . . . but it was equally true that he disliked useless bloodshed and would not brook cruelty for its own sake from anyone in his command . . . otherwise the doctor himself might have been dead long ago.
Merbillay held up a battered tin pan. The doctor dislodged, slowly, a bullet fragment, what seemed to be a lady’s hairpin, the tongue of an iron belt buckle, and finally, with greater difficulty and greater care, a twisted, square cut iron nail. Guiaou’s concerned face leaned near Merbillay’s in the lard-colored lamplight. The metal shards dropped from the doctor’s fingernails and rang on the pan’s tin bottom. Toussaint interrupted himself.
“Kite’m oué sa,” he said. Let me see.
Merbillay raised the pan under his chin. Toussaint hitched himself up with a grunt. He stirred the bits of metal with a blunt fingertip. Shaking his head, he picked up the hairpin, chuckled at it softly, then let it fall back into the pan and went on with his dictation.
At last the wound was clean. The doctor held a fresh rag over it to stanch the renewed bleeding, while Merbillay soaked herbs in hot water, then composed a compress. The doctor took the damp packet from her hands and