Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [241]
Fontelle had established her cauldron in the spot to which the wounded had been moved. There proved to be as good foraging here as in the town, and it was more out of the way of the new influx of troops. Already she’d cooked a quantity of small yellow sweet potatoes for their breakfast. They ate and set to the work of changing dressings. The doctor kept away from the fort all that day, though it was near enough through the sheltering trees that he could hear picks slamming into the soil and men grunting as they dragged cannon into place. Toussaint had brought heavier guns, eight- and twelve-pounders mostly.
At evening, with Fontelle and Paulette and Bienvenu, he walked down to Petite Rivière. Clouds were hurrying over the sky, blotting the stars as soon as they appeared. A stray guinea hen, covering her chicks, darted across the trail ahead of them. As the hen took shelter in the brush, a military drumbeat began in the town below.
“They are beating the general.” Bienvenu cocked his head to the drum. His gait picked up the rhythm. The doctor felt a cold bolt run down from the top of his skull to the place in the ground where his heel struck. All day he had managed not to think of what Toussaint’s departure might portend. Now whatever it was had begun. He reached for Fontelle’s and Paulette’s hands and squeezed them briefly, then let go. Fontelle walked with her turbanned head held high, eyes fixed on the way before them, her long face angled toward the sound of forty drums. Though less obviously than Bienvenu’s, her pace seemed influenced by the beating.
By unspoken accord they went to the church, circling to the rear, since the drums were loudest in the square in front. The door was shut but they found Père Vidaut in the house behind, stuffing a few garments into a cracked and moldy leather portmanteau.
“What has happened?” the doctor said. “What is happening?”
“I can’t be sure but I fear the worst,” the priest said shortly. Neither of his young black acolytes was anywhere in sight. “This morning they rounded up all the prisoners from the plain into the warehouse again, and now they are hailing them into the square—I interceded for the release of a few. But I can do no more here now. I am going to seek the protection of Madame Dessalines.”
He pulled the portmanteau shut by the handles and turned to face the doctor. “You’d have done better to stay on the height,” he said. “Among your patients—where your value as a doctor would not be forgotten.”
“What of the surgeons at Massicot’s?”
“Gone to ground, if they are wise.” The priest paused. “I got Descourtilz out of the warehouse. He may have gone to Massicot’s—I don’t know. But follow me—there’s not much time.”
They crossed the dooryard to the rear of the church—the priest darted in through a small portal behind the altar. In the stale darkness within he groped for chalice and salver and stuffed them into the portmanteau atop the wads of his clothing. The doctor could barely distinguish his movements in the dark. Fontelle and Paulette were pressed against his back. Through a chink in the closed front door came a bar of torchlight from the square.
“Wait,” said the priest. “What’s that?” Voices had been raised beyond the church door—the doctor recognized Dessalines and Lamartinière. The priest moved lightly to the crack and the doctor followed. Their heads knocked together as they both stooped to peer.
The doctor lowered himself to one knee and found a wider gap before his eye. He could hear the priest’s hoarse breathing above him. Through the crack he saw the hundreds of white prisoners who’d been herded into the square, half naked most of them, arms bound with rags of their own shirts. Their faces were drawn