Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [278]
His stomach responded to the thought of a regular meal with a couple of interested growls. Maillart tightened his diaphragm and stood up in his stirrups, peering ahead. On the outskirts of Verrettes a skirmish line had appeared, and a few shots were fired, though at such long range that the balls were spent when they reached the French column. Pamphile de Lacroix ordered the drummer to beat the charge. The skirmishers, mostly un-uniformed field hands, scattered easily enough, though some still sniped at the French flanks from the trees.
“We are not so terrifying as we were,” Lacroix muttered, as he made his way back down the line to Maillart.
“That band of irregulars presents us no real threat,” the major replied.
“No,” said Lacroix, with a distant smile. “But I don’t like their confidence.”
The departure of the skirmishers revealed a pall of smoke. Maillart’s heart sank. Verrettes was burned too—yes, the houses were destroyed from one end to the other, he saw as they rode to the central square. The Place d’Armes was carpeted with the bodies of white men, women, children. Some preserved an attitude of supplication in their deaths, kneeling slumped against the walls, their empty hands stretched out for mercy. The blood was not yet dry on the ground. Maillart saw a woman who seemed to have been slain by a bayonet or a lance that had first passed through the trunk of the infant she held to her bosom. He looked away quickly but there was nowhere safe to look except for the darkening sky.
Captain Paltre leaned sideways out of his saddle and puked on the ground, then straightened and rode on, his eyes glazed, a trail of vomit at the corner of his mouth. Maillart wished he would collect himself enough to wipe it away. Paltre had reported a similar scene when he’d entered Saint Marc with Boudet’s division, just shortly after Dessalines had put the town to bayonet and torch. Apparently he was not yet hardened to such spectacles.
Buzzards walked comfortably among the dead, shrugging their black wings, like old men stooping in black tailcoats. From their attentions, many of the corpses stared from empty eye sockets. Against a tree in the center of the square, something flopped and groaned. Lacroix hurried in that direction, then called for a farrier to come with tools to draw the heavy nails that transfixed the white man’s palms to the living wood. His swollen tongue hung out of his mouth. Maillart gave him a drink of water.
“Who did it?” Lacroix said.
“Dessalines,” the man said thickly. “This morning, Dessalines was here.” When the second nail was drawn, he slumped to the ground in a faint.
“He won’t live,” Lacroix said grimly.
“Most likely not,” Maillart agreed. He was trying not to look at Paltre, who sat dumbstruck astride his halted horse. Somehow the smear of vomit by Paltre’s mouth distressed him more than all this scene of carnage.
“My Christ.” Lacroix swept his arm around the panorama. “The reports don’t give one a proper idea . . .”
Maillart said nothing.
“They are not human,” Lacroix said. “Whoever did such thing cannot be human.”
“Don’t say that,” Maillart heard himself blurt. “Never say it.”
Lacroix looked at him curiously, perhaps somewhat suspiciously, but Maillart said no more. And anyway the order was coming down the line to evacuate the ruined town.
He had no appetite that night, not even for his ration of hardtack. They camped on the south bank of the Artibonite, squared off in battalions, to protect their equipment and horses at the center of each square. At first the men had