Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [28]
Claudine fluttered at the little boys who still stood round-eyed at her back. “Did you not hear?” she hissed at them. “Go find something for these men to drink—and take their horses to water.”
Michel Arnaud received the news of Toussaint’s arrival with mixed emotions. The word that horsemen were on the way came to him shouted from man to man across the cane fields, and by the time he stepped to the door of the mill he had the comical view of tiny Dieufait leading the huge white warhorse toward the water trough. Toussaint was here, Arnaud thought, in part to reassure himself—to touch the proofs that his government had restored conditions wherein a planter might refine white sugar. For sugar was money, and money was guns . . . Arnaud chopped off that sequence of ideas. Also of course there was the issue of inspection, and enforcement of the new and strict labor code for the free blacks. Arnaud had benefited from these rules, although his workers found them very harsh. But at any rate it was better to be inspected by Toussaint than Dessalines. The whip had long since been abandoned, but if Dessalines got hold of a laggard or a truant, he might order the culprit flogged with a bundle of thorny vines, which tore the skin and laid the flesh open to infection, so that the man might afterward die. It was true that the others would work that much harder, for a few days at least after Dessalines had passed. Toussaint had a different style—if he had not been terribly provoked, he punished only with a glare, whereupon the suspect would apply himself to his cane knife or hoe with tripled diligence, pursued by his own imagination of what might follow if he did not.
But somehow Arnaud was not eager for this meeting. Let Claudine play hostess if she would; he knew she’d press Toussaint and his men to dine with them that night. If he accepted, they’d be in for a display of his famous piety on the morrow morn . . . He pulled down the brim of the wide straw hat he wore against the sun, and walked behind the mill down the crooked path which led through the bush to his distillery. Arnaud did not drink strong spirits as carelessly as he once had, but it seemed to him now advisable to test the quality of the morning run.
There, about twenty minutes later, Toussaint came down with his companions: Captain Riau of the Second Demibrigade and Guiaou, a cavalryman from Toussaint’s honor guard. At once Arnaud, bowing and smiling, proffered a sample of his first-run rum, but the Governor-General refused it, though he saw it dripped directly from the coil. Riau and Guiaou accepted their measure, and drank with evident enthusiasm.
“What news have you from the Collège de la Marche?” Toussaint inquired.
“I beg your pardon?” Arnaud stuttered.
Toussaint did not bother to repeat the question. Arnaud’s brain ratcheted backward. A couple of Cléo’s sons, whom he had fathered, had indeed been recently shipped off to that same school in France where Toussaint’s brats were stabled. They were actually Arnaud’s only sons so far as he knew, as Claudine was barren, but he had never meant to acknowledge them. He had sold all Cléo’s children off the plantation when they were quite small, but a couple of them had reappeared, a little after Cléo did. Faced with Cléo’s importuning, Arnaud had seen the wisdom of sending those boys overseas to school—which got them off the property at least. In his present situation he was not able to pay the whole of their expenses, but it seemed that Cléo had a brother who’d prospered quite wonderfully under the new regime . . .
How the devil had Toussaint known about it? He made it his business to know many unlikely things. At least he had not put the question in Claudine’s presence; there was that to be grateful for.
“No, no, we have heard nothing yet,” he said, with rather a sickly smile. “The boys are remiss!—they do not write their mother.”
There the subject rested. The four of them set out on the obligatory tour: cane fields, provision grounds, the cane mill and refinery . . . At the end, Toussaint intruded into Arnaud’s books,