Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [205]
“Get back!” The sergeant’s voice. He and Guizot made a bolt for their closest cover in the French advance guard, but this cover was not very good—the enemy foot soldiers, emboldened by the cavalry charge, were pressing harder with their bayonets. They were cut off. The charge had divided them from the main body of the French, left them pinned between two enemy forces, and already some of the troopers near Guizot and Aloyse were throwing down their weapons and raising empty hands for quarter.
“We’d better run for it,” Aloyse grunted, and when Guizot peered doubtfully at the scrum of men and horses between them and the main French body, he added succinctly, “Better to die on the field than be captured by the savages—but you do as you like.”
Guizot followed the sergeant’s desperate dash, dodging among the whipping hooves, leaping over fallen bodies. A black horseman with a grotesquely scarred face rode down on him, meaning to split his head with a coutelas. Guizot, bemused by the man’s strange and horrible aspect, got his sword up to parry just in time. The horseman circled for another cut, and as he did so a gap opened and Guizot plunged into it, following the sergeant’s flying pigtail. The French line parted to let them in, then closed behind them. His chest burning, Guizot fixed his sword point in the ground and bowed over the pommel, sucking for air, but before he could well get his breath the drums were beating a retreat and he had to move again. Incredibly, they were withdrawing, abandoning the field to this ragged Negro army, falling back to shelter in the mouth of the ravine.
All that had taken place in that desperate charge was a bright, bewildering swirl to Placide. He was still in possession of all his weapons, and his sword arm was tremendously sore, so he thought that he must have acquitted himself decently. What he remembered best, most fondly, was that Toussaint had moved to hold him back from the battle, then changed his mind and let him go.
A guard post had been set to observe the French where they huddled inside the mouth of the gorge. Placide rode back in the direction of Toussaint’s temporary command post, in the thin shade of a raket tree on Habitation Lacroix. Now, in the relative quiet, he was more aware of the ringing in his ears from the explosion of the magazine that morning, but the high whine only added to his exhilaration.
As he rode in he passed some thirty disconsolate French prisoners sitting on the ground with their hands on their heads, under guard of Monpoint, who had after all survived the charge, and a couple other men of the guard. Toussaint was sitting behind his portable writing desk, opened on a section of log that served as a table. Doctor Hébert, grubby-faced and hollow-eyed, was writing something to his dictation. The shadows of pulpy, spined raket lay on his page.
“Ah, my boy,” Toussaint said, looking up. “You come in good time to help me with my letters. The good doctor is weary, and also I must send him with our wounded to Petite Rivière. And I will soon be riding to Gonaives to see how the day has gone there.”
“I will go with you,” Placide said.
At Toussaint’s words, the doctor stood, nodded to Placide, then stumbled slightly as he moved away, toward where Fontelle and Paulette reclined on bandage bundles by their donkeys. Placide sat down in the place he had vacated.
“No,” said Toussaint. “I would have you see to the safety of the family first.”
“Of course, but where are they?” Placide said, with a pang, for he had not thought of his mother and brothers since the unimaginably distant morning before.
“If it is the will of God, they have all gone to Pont d’Ester,” Toussaint said. “But soon I mean to send them to Grand Cahos.”
Placide looked down at the paper the doctor had been copying; the letters swam under his eyes. Some reckoning of prisoners, lists of the dead. He looked up.
“But we have beaten them, Papa—we are masters of the field.