Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [243]
The roof of the house burst into flames and several of the surgeons came rushing out the back, closely pursued by a dozen more of Dessalines’s soldiers. Most scattered in the alley, but one jumped up into the limbs of Massicot’s mango tree. The doctor crouched in the shadow of the fence, hiding his face from the burst of firelight. Bienvenu hovered over him. Two black soldiers circled the manguier, jabbing at the surgeon’s calves with their coutelas points.
“Shoot him,” said one, and the other replied, “Don’t waste the powder.” A third soldier made a leap and caught the surgeon around the shins and dragged him down, screaming like a girl. One of the others opened his belly with a coutelas; the surgeon went on screaming and tossing his head as the black men stirred his guts out onto the ground. Fanfan’s squeals were silenced now. A crew of men huffed as they lifted her to hang from her back trotters from a branch of the same mango tree. Blood drooled from a wide fatty gash in her throat. Someone took a coutelas and disemboweled her, rather more fastidiously than they had the surgeon. Impaled on the fence pole, Massicot’s head gaped upon the scene, its slack jaws revealing many blackened, rotting teeth.
Bienvenu snatched at the doctor’s arm; they ran across the alley and dove into a low hut, rolling in dust and dirty straw and feathers. The doctor’s hand came up sticky with a broken egg. He shook it loose and wiped it on the straw and found that he was grasping someone’s forearm— Descourtilz, half hidden under straw.
“Has Massicot lost his pig at last?” said Descourtilz, but a black man on the other side hushed him at once, as Bienvenu covered the doctor’s mouth with his hand and camouflaged his head with a handful of dung-smelling straw. For some time they lay silent there, the doctor inhaling Descourtilz’s sour breath, for they were nose to nose. The flames of the burning house came flickering through the lattice of the chicken coop. The doctor could not lose the image of Massicot’s head, the dead stare on the carcass of his Fanfan, expression dulling as the eyeballs dried in the heat of the blaze. The dream-distance had been torn away, so that the doctor had to struggle not to vomit in the straw. Two silhouettes blocked the firelight on the lattice, then with a chuckle someone threw in a torch. Straw and the roof were alight at once. The doctor lunged and broke the lattice with his shoulder and came up running, scattering smoldering straw. Descourtilz must have made off in the other direction; he seemed to have drawn off pursuit.
Flanked by Bienvenu, the doctor ran till he was winded, then slumped panting against the hot stone wall of a burning house, pressing a hand against the stitch in his side. Dessalines’s men had broken into the rum stores and were drunk and had lost all discipline—the prohibition against wasting powder forgotten, they fired their overcharged guns in the air or into cows and chickens or anything that stirred. A gang rounded the corner and bore down on the doctor and Bienvenu.
“Aba blan!” the lead man shouted. Down with the whites! He swung his blade at the doctor’s neck. The doctor twisted away as he ducked— not far enough, but the blade was stopped by the bone at the top of his skull. The blow set off a chain of colored lights across his brain, and both ears rang amazingly. He was down on his knees and elbows, blood pouring into his right eye.
“Ann koupé têt tout blan yo!” Let’s cut off the head of all the whites! The coutelas swung down, and stopped with a clang. Bienvenu’s blade had parried it.
“Li pa blan,” said Bienvenu, in a deep and terrifying tone the doctor had never before heard. He’s not white.
“Pa blan?” the leader hesitated.
“Li gegne peau clair anpil anpil,” said another of the group. He has very, very light skin . . .
“Gegne peau clair men li pa blan pou sa!” Bienvenu insisted. He spun his coutelas to clear the leader’s blade. The leader took a step back from the