Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [127]
Now he saw that the horse’s right foreleg had been shattered. There had been nothing to do but shoot it, after all. Perhaps those men had only meant to help him. Certainly they might have killed him, without much trouble or risk to themselves.
With his penknife he hacked off one of his shirt sleeves and used it to bind up his swollen ankle. He could not get his boot back on when he was done, but the bare foot took his weight with a pain that was just bearable. He was horribly thirsty when he stood up. He’d been carrying some water in a skin bag, but the fall had burst the vessel and the water had run out to mingle with the blood and horse piss soaking the ground. His walking stick, a novelty made of a twisted and dried bull’s pizzle, was whole, still strapped to the back of his saddle. He cut it free and went limping down the lane, depending heavily on the stick, his pistol dragging down his other hand.
It was not far, it could not be, but the distance was difficult to cover. Arnaud limped around one bend, then two. There before him appeared the wavering hallucination of a young black woman in a tight red dress, her head bound up in a shimmering blue cloth. She sat on a boulder amid the ashes just off the roadside. On the rock beside her was a tin tray with a white pitcher and a metal cup. Arnaud staggered toward the apparition. To his surprise, she did not vanish in the heat glaze when he came near.
“Ba’m dlo,” he croaked. Give me water. The woman only gazed at him, without expression. She was plump, no, ripe to bursting, straining every red seam of her dress. In another time he’d have lusted for her mightily. She poured a cup and set it on the tray. Arnaud pinned the pistol under the arm that held the stick, and painfully stretched down to take the cup. He poured the water down his swollen throat. A little ran out the corner of his mouth and he chased those drops with the tip of his tongue.
“Merci,” he said, and fumbled a coin from his breeches pocket to offer her. The woman only looked at him impassively. Arnaud let the coin clang down on the tray. He limped ahead, along the lane.
It was growing cooler now, and breezy, wind running ahead of the rain from the north. If he didn’t come to shelter soon, he’d have no water that he could use. Now to the left of the road, nothing was burned, and he could see the leaves of tall green cane, trembling in the wind above the citrus hedges. And this was his own property, if not another chimera. But that woman’s water had tasted real enough.
The wooden gate was still there, tended by a toothless crone who garbled something he couldn’t make out as Arnaud stumbled through. Two little boys went flying up the long allée ahead of him. He crept on, leaning on the stick. There was singing in the cane on either side of him, beyond the surviving palm trees and the stumps with their new shoots. He looked one way and the other but saw no one. The men were hidden in the cane, singing their way out of the fields before the rain.
Presently the figure of Claudine appeared before him, framed in the top of the allée like an object seen backward in a telescope. Once something else had stood in that same place, but Arnaud’s mind refused it now, like his horse had refused that last jump.
At the time of their marriage he’d felt small love for her, and in their first years together in the colony he’d come to positively dislike her. The prize he’d supposed he’d brought home from France was barren. Afterward, he’d returned to her from a sense of duty, the same motive that made her carry buckets to the cane fields. But he felt very glad to see her now. Why did she not come out to meet him? Perhaps he was already dead, and so invisible to her.
Yet when he had finally reached her, he drew himself up and felt a little stronger.
“Michel,” she said. There was just a touch of the alien glitter in her eyes. At least she knew him. “You have come home.”
“I see I have still a home to come to,” he replied, looking beyond her— it was all there, the rebuilt house and outbuildings all intact.