Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [252]
Art. 1—General Toussaint and General Christophe are outlawed, and all citizens are ordered to pursue them, and to treat them as rebels against the French Republic . . .
To tease the letters into their words made Guiaou’s head go spinning, and he saw nothing in those sentences of any importance to himself or to Guerrier.
“More lies of the blancs,” he said with a smile; then, tossing the paper back into the wind, he urged his horse onward to follow Toussaint.
Tocquet had meant to go alone to Gonaives for salt. Despite the recent devastation, he guessed that the markets would be functioning at some level by this time, even on the ashes of the town. Or if not, he could go on to the salt pans themselves, farther south. It was that possible extension of the journey that made Tocquet assume that the women would all stay behind at Thibodet. An outing to Gonaives would no longer be the party of pleasure it might have been just a couple of weeks earlier, and on the roads farther south, who could know?—Rochambeau had claimed a wholesale victory over Toussaint at Ravine à Couleuvre, but the stories coming in from people that lived in that region were quite different. By all those accounts, Toussaint had got away with most of his army undamaged, and where that army was now, no one could say for sure.
But since their reunion on the day of that battle, Elise had not wanted to let him out of her sight, or as Tocquet sometimes thought, didn’t want to let herself out of his sight. Ordinarily such attachment would have soon made him restless, but now for some intangible reason he found that he rather appreciated it. Maybe it was an effect of war. In any case, the mission for salt was Elise’s idea from the start. It was Elise who had schemed for the pigs of Thibodet to be herded off into the jungle and hidden, by Caco and a cohort of children, from the French soldiers who’d settled all over the plantation like, as she put it, a plague of locusts. “They might have plundered Sancey for provisions,” she said, “and if they were so profligate as to burn it instead, I don’t see why we are obliged to feed them here.”
Now that the French had marched off to the south, Elise had declared the hogs should be slaughtered—preserved meat would be easier to store and conceal than all that meat on the hoof. Tocquet would have dried all the pork on the boucan, but Elise held out for at least a few hams salted in the European way, and she wanted to sample the salt for herself. And Isabelle, who was bored and irritable since her Captain Daspir had marched off with the rest, insisted on coming along as well. So only Nanon remained behind to keep the children.
What pleasures Gonaives had once offered were now, as Tocquet had predicted, no more. The restaurant where he and Elise sometimes dined had burned down to its foundation, though eventually they did find the management serving meals from iron tripods on the waterfront, where the sea wind blew the clouds of ash away from the kettles and the clientele. In the center of Gonaives, a few gangs of soldiers and sailors worked slowly, feebly, at the reconstruction of the headquarters and a couple of other key buildings, amid swirls of ash that mingled with the dust. Isabelle and Elise had wound their heads and faces with long scarves, so that they resembled a pair of Bedouin bandits. Tocquet and Bazau and Gros-Jean each wore an extra mouchwa tied over his face, and by the time they’d succeeded in buying their salt, the cloth was black with ash around the nostrils.
The ash blew inland from the waterfront, and they could uncover their faces to eat. From the kettles they took bowls of riz ak pwa, plantain, and a little boiled fish with peppers, and ate sitting on low, rough-carpentered chairs made from green wood in the countryside. All of them fell to with frank appetite, even the women, Isabelle sorting bones from fish with her tongue as efficiently as any old black grann from the mountain. They