Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [239]
He left the priest and went to call on Massicot. The house was calmer than the day before, with shutters open to the breeze. Massicot stood in the backyard, lowering blackened strips of banana peel to the grateful jaws of Fanfan. Descourtilz and Pinchon had found berths among the surgeons here. They’d had an unpleasant journey to Petite Rivière, the doctor learned, chivvied along by Dessalines’s troops on the retreat from the embers of Saint Marc. Many had seen their properties burned as they crossed the Artibonite valley, and a few had been killed, either for an example or only on the whim of Dessalines.
“A terrible man,” Pinchon said tremblingly. “A savage! If he opens his snuffbox, one’s life depends on whether he finds his tobacco damp or dry . . .”
“Condui li pissé,” Descourtilz muttered.
“What?” said the doctor.
“Take him off to piss,” Descourtilz repeated, smearing his thin, sweat-sticky hair back over his round head. “That is his phrase if one is to be killed—it’s your own blood you’ll be pissing.”
“Or, fé pyé-li sauté tè!” Pinchon said with a shudder. “Make his feet jump off the earth—have you heard that one?”
“Gentlemen,” said the doctor. “These strike me as unhealthy reflections.”
“What would you?” Pinchon lapsed into a sulk. Descourtilz only shrugged and looked toward the rear window.
“One might get away, perhaps?” the doctor said. “What do you know how it is in the direction of Ester, or further to the north?”
“Oh,” said Descourtilz. “The arrival of French troops is rumored hourly, yet always they seem to come too late. The inhabitants of Saint Marc were butchered while General Boudet looked on, so we hear— from a distance just too great for him to intervene. Our guards drank themselves unconscious one night before we came here, but though we might have got away there was no place to run to—nowhere in all the country to hide from these marauders.”
“And that old fool cares only for the safety of his pig,” Pinchon said, with a bitter jerk of his jaw toward the backyard.
“It occupies his mind, I suppose,” the doctor said. “Well, Toussaint has come, at least—he is not likely to mistreat us.”
Descourtilz snorted. “Toussaint prefers not to bloody his own hands,” he said. “He leaves that work to some other to do, and turns his face away.”
“You oughtn’t to speak ill of him,” the doctor said. “He’s your best hope.”
He took his leave and found Bienvenu waiting for him outside the back fence, ready with remonstrances for his leaving the fort without an escort, even by broad day. At this moment Bienvenu’s solicitude made the doctor feel all the more confined. His own chance of escape from this situation was probably no better than Descourtilz’s. Toussaint was also his own best hope, and Toussaint looked dangerously ill. With Bienvenu, the doctor climbed slowly to the fort, his limbs leaden in the afternoon heat. The ditch outside the walls was now so deep that Guiaou had to lay aside his shovel and span it with a plank for the two of them to cross.
Men were dragging new cannon to the reinforced embrasures, but no one paid the doctor any mind. In the shade of his ajoupa, he furtively scratched a shallow trench by the wall and there interred his long rifle, wrapped in a cloth, then spread his sleeping mat over the loose dirt. His pistols he hid in his straw macoute, under the packets and bundles of herbs. If Dessalines should catch him armed—no, Descourtilz was right, at least for the moment. There was no flight, and resistance would certainly be fatal.
The fort had emptied when he came out of the ajoupa; everyone was working on the ditches outside. The doctor set his hands on his hips and arched into the ache at the small of his back, turning in the direction of the sun that lowered over the powder magazine. A silhouette emerged from beside the building; the doctor squinted and shaded his eyes. The afterburn of the sun’s glare spread a black cross over his vision, and out of the cross Toussaint emerged, staggering