Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [245]
Descourtilz wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked off over the river and the plain. The doctor noticed that his face and hands and forearms were dotted with drops of dried blood from a webwork of fine scratches.
“Oh,” he said. “I survive by miracles—I would scarcely credit them myself, if I heard them from another.”
“What of Pinchon?” the doctor said reluctantly.
“Dead,” said Descourtilz.
“Well,” said the doctor. “He always thought himself unlucky. I suppose that in the end he was.”
“You might say so,” Descourtilz said. “We were caught up together when all of us paroled to the town were locked up in the depots again. Père Vidaut came and winkled me out of that place, just before the killing began, and Pinchon too, for he stuck to me like a barnacle. We were made to appear before Dessalines, and he ordered that we must die with the rest. By that time they had already begun bayoneting all those who were left in the warehouse, I think. Then Madame Dessalines, who is a saint, spoke up for me, and said I might be useful as a doctor, and so she stayed his hand for a moment. And when Dessalines was distracted, she took us to her own chamber and let us hide under the bed. But then Dessalines came there too, with some of his officers—if one may call them that, the savages—to plot the massacre. He showed his whip scars, and reminded them all of the abuses of slavery, to stir their blood thirst. The whole time my leg hung out in the light, because Pinchon had got in under the bed first, and would not make me enough room, so finally someone saw it, and I was hauled out, and Pinchon too. They cut Pinchon to pieces there in the bedroom while I watched, but somehow, I can’t say why, Dessalines sent me away to his wife again.”
Descourtilz cleared his throat. “I had run enough risks in that house, I thought, so I ran to seek shelter at Massicot’s, but the old fool would keep opening the door to see that no one bothered his pig. Well, they set the house on fire in the end, all the same. By the grace of God that old Negro you found with me in the shed appeared—Pompey, I shall never forget his name, though I didn’t know him when he first approached me—in fact I thought he meant to kill me, but it seems I had cured him of something once, or so he believes. After that chicken house was burned, he got me away from the murderers and hid me in a hedge full of thorns—you see I have been scratched to ribbons—and so I passed the night.”
“And the priest?” the doctor said. He was thinking of Fontelle and Paulette and what might have become of them in Père Vidaut’s care.
“If he still lives, I don’t know,” Descourtilz said. “But he is a brave man, and determined—he kept coming to the prisons, though the guards would beat him, and he got many people out, with bribes or by pretending to have orders, as he did with me. I don’t know what became of him after that. I would be dead if not for him, I know. What barbarity it has all been.” He looked again at the cushion of smoke above the town, with its rank smell of charring flesh. “But I think the worst was when I was lying half under that bed, waiting for them to discover me, and the whole time Dessalines and his men were talking of nothing but death . . .”
The doctor looked where Descourtilz was looking. He fingered the folding spyglass that lay in his pocket, but after all there was nothing down by the town that he wanted to see more closely.
That afternoon Dessalines marched out of the town with a good number of the men Toussaint had left him. Descourtilz was sent away at the same time, to go with ambulances to the neighboring peak of Morne Calvaire, but no one gave any instruction to Doctor Hébert. Maybe Bienvenu had been telling the truth the night before and he had somehow lost his whiteness. With no mirror, there was nothing to remind him of his color, now that Descourtilz had gone. The soldiers in the fort were friendly toward him; indeed he seemed to move among smiles. No one seemed to remember last night’s bloodbath, though most