Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [217]
The rebels had set fire to the town, then disappeared in the confusion. So it seemed, for there was no armed resistance as the French marched in, though every building burned. It was just as it had been at Le Cap, Daspir thought bitterly. He was weary beyond description, and ready to faint from thirst. The smoke was heavy. He masked his face with a white handkerchief; the fabric was soon blackened around his nostrils and mouth.
The rebel headquarters was evacuated; flames licked out of every window. General Hardy, who’d entered the town by way of Pont des Dattes, was calling for a bucket brigade. But the well in the town square had been plugged by the carcass of a dead bullock. Daspir dismounted, rallied a handful of troopers, and supervised its removal. It then developed that no buckets were to be found, or nearly none—any container that would burn had been added to the pyres. Besides, the men were mostly out of order, plunging through the burning houses to loot whatever they could before the fire destroyed it all. Their huzzahs of victory, loud as they were, rang strangely against this background.
Daspir sank down on the curb of the well, took off his handkerchief, and looked dully at the mask-like charcoal marks his breath had made. Seated, he was below the worst of the smoke. His horse, reins trailing, moved up to snuffle the water that had begun to pool within the well curb once the dead ox was dragged off. Daspir rinsed his handkerchief and pressed it to his temples and the back of his neck, then dared to scoop some water in the palm of his hand to drink.
With that refreshment spreading through his parched body, he felt a little encouraged. When Cyprien blundered up to him, a phantom drifting out of the smoke, Daspir hailed him with an expression of good cheer.
“We shall not sup so well as we’d hoped tonight, it seems.”
“I think not,” Cyprien coughed. “Hardtack for us again, if we’re so lucky.”
Daspir stood up beside him, covering his nose and mouth with the wet handkerchief. Darkness had completely lowered now. They were facing the church, whose walls had already been consumed, so that the framework stood out like blackened ribs against the fire that breathed inside. As they watched, most of the timbers collapsed in the back of the building, sending up a great geyser of sparks.
“Has Toussaint been taken?” Daspir asked, with small hope.
Cyprien coughed again and spat on a cobblestone so hot from the fires that his spittle hissed. “Does it look like he has been? No, the report is that he has cut his way through Rochambeau and got off somewhere to the south.”
“Indeed,” Daspir said. “I suppose that only means that we will meet him on another day.”
There was some commotion now behind them, a beating of hooves and sudden shouting at the far end of the square, but Daspir was too weary even to turn his head that way. His stomach rumbled, and with that he remembered to tap the pockets of his coat.
“Take heart,” he said to Cyprien. “I have yet two avocados and an orange.”
22
At day’s end at the top of Granmorne, Placide began to hear roaring and the tattoo of French marching drums, rising above the gunfire from the direction of Gonaives. He slipped out of the pocket of trees where his family was sheltered and crept onto the rim of a huge black boulder that jutted from the northwestern brow of the hill. A red fire had crowned over the hollow of the town, and beyond it the sun burned bitterly on the horizon.
It was long since his father had ridden away, well past the appointed hour of three, but Suzanne had refused to leave Granmorne until some word of him came. The whites of Thibodet had only just departed. When he looked down more steeply from his rock ledge, Placide picked out a couple of their group—Isabelle Cigny and her son—as they turned a bend