Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [234]
The fort was rectangular, enclosing no more than a few hundred feet, with the main gate oriented toward the negligible slope to the town. Only when within the walls did one recognize the real height of the place. Below the long wall to the southwest, a cliff dropped off abruptly. Below, a dizzying distance below, the great river of the Artibonite made a slow muddy coil around the base of the hill.
This peak, which the people of the region called La Crête à Pierrot, marked the beginning of the Cahos mountain range, which stretched eastward into the interior, toward Mirebalais and the Spanish border. Just to the west was a small bitasyon, with little cases and corn plantings quarried into the more steeply rising mountainsides in that direction. On the day of his arrival, the doctor had arranged for the people there to help raise some ajoupas for himself and the wounded men. The fort had been left unfinished when the English withdrew from the colony, and it was not in much state of defense. There was no garrison but for the wounded, and except for the powder magazine there was no shelter either.
Yet the doctor found himself better here than in the town. The air was fresh and it was cool, chilly at night, in fact. The chill and the breezes sweeping the hill discouraged the mosquitoes. Sometimes he went down to the town to sup—there was a community of whites at Petite Rivière, and a couple of surgeons who lodged in the house of one Massicot, but he always returned to the hilltop to sleep. It was convenient to be near his patients, and in the worse case, if trouble erupted below, he might slip away east on the mountain paths.
As for what had happened at Gonaives or Ennery, no news came for several days. The doctor tried not to fret about his family. He knew that Fontelle must be suppressing similar thoughts, and her people were more widely scattered. For the moment it was calm enough in the surrounds of Petite Rivière, and it looked riskier to leave than to remain. He thought it most likely that the inhabitants of Thibodet were still with Madame Louverture and her relations, but he could not know where they might have found their refuge. If he stayed where he was, surely Toussaint would come with some intelligence. Yet when the commotion of an arrival did begin, the people in the town and outlying bitasyons all began to cry, Dessalines! Dessalines k’ap vini! Dessalines is coming!
The doctor straightened from his work and went to an embrasure where a rusting six-pound cannon tilted on a broken carriage. Below, the sluggish river reddened in the setting sun. Voices echoed up from the town, which was mostly hidden from him by a screen of trees, and he heard the weary tap of a drum and the whistling of a single fife. A bend of the road below the town brought the approaching column into his view. When he put his spyglass to his eye, he saw that a couple of hundred white civilians were limping along, pressed by Dessalines’s troops, their heads drooping like the heads of slaves in a coffle.
He did not hurry the evening round, but when it was done he washed his face, put on the cleanest shirt at his disposal, and went down with Paulette and Fontelle to Petite Rivière. With them came one of Toussaint’s soldiers, Bienvenu. The doctor had been treating him, successfully so far, for wounds of mitraille in his right arm and shoulder. Bienvenu carried his right arm in a sling, but as he was glad to demonstrate, he could still aim a pistol and wield a coutelas or a bâton in his left. He’d assigned himself to the doctor’s protection, out of gratitude and old acquaintance; Bienvenu had joined Toussaint’s forces by the intercession of Riau, and from Riau the doctor knew that Bienvenu was a fugitive from Habitation Arnaud, whence he’d fled before the risings of ninety-one, though he didn’t know if Bienvenu knew he knew it. Glad as he was of the extra eyes and arm, he carried his own pistols too,