Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [293]
Was Toussaint ahead of them, flying to Mirebalais? Guizot had actually brushed his sleeve, on the desert plain of Périsse. But their intelligence was none too reliable—they hardly knew the whereabouts of the other French divisions. The switchbacks of the trails twisting through the Cahos mountains left their compass needles spinning beyond reason. The endless self-resembling turnings of their movement were punctuated by ambushes every so often—quick skirmishes offered by mobs of half-naked, barefoot blacks, sometimes led by men in more regular uniform and sometimes not. These were Dessalines’s men, was the rumored report, though the notorious black general did not reveal himself in person. Other rumors told that Dessalines had engaged with General Hardy on the slopes of the mountain called Nolo, and been beaten back eastward toward Mirebalais, but Rochambeau’s scouts could not certainly confirm those rumors.
The ambushes and skirmishes did small damage so far as casualties were counted, and yet they wore away at the morale of Rochambeau’s men—to be picked, constantly harassed, by an enemy that would not stand to fight. Guizot was increasingly aware of how rapidly this army of shadows always parting before them closed to reoccupy the territory over which Rochambeau had just passed. He knew Sergeant Aloyse was aware of that also, though the two of them did not discuss it.
Toussaint was not waiting for them at Mirebalais; not even a cat had been left alive in that place. A pall of smoke hung over the cleft in the mountains, above the pocket of river valley where the town lay in its ruins. Miles before they’d reached the place, they knew they’d find no shelter there. The plantations too had been put to the torch for a half-mile radius around the town. They entered at sundown, eyes burning, coughing from the lingering smoke. Guizot had tied a dirty kerchief over his face; it soon grew black around the nostrils, but it did little to block the foul smell of his own festering wound. Oddly, there were no human corpses in the town, though the wells had been stopped with the carcasses of draft animals.
They camped a quarter-mile upriver, on the right bank of the Artibonite. Aloyse hauled water and worked on Guizot’s arm with hot compresses, until the captain had slipped into a feverish sleep. In his dream he saw the hurt arm blackened to the shoulder, rot spreading across his chest to corrupt his heart. But when he woke the wound looked little worse than it had the day before and the fever had slackened; his mind was clear. A messenger from the Captain-General had reached Rochambeau at dawn: they were to move northwest again, along the right bank of the Artibonite toward the coast. They’d find the enemy brought to bay at last when they joined Leclerc at Petite Rivière.
With that envoy came the news of the massacre at Habitation Chirry; it was there that Dessalines had marched the whites of Mirebalais to be butchered. Later that morning their line of march traversed a ridge that gave them a long view of pale mutilated bodies scattered over the burnt stubble of what had perhaps been a cornfield, three hundred dead of every age and sex with the vultures among them still more numerous. Rochambeau would not stop for a burial detail, and the men did not protest his urgency, but tramped on doggedly, burning eyes fixed ahead. They marched for an hour after dark, but when the sky clouded over they were obliged to camp, near enough to Verrettes that the rot-stink of that other field of massacre reached them from across the river, borne on the south wind, mingling in Guizot’s nostrils with the rot of his own arm.
Plagued by mosquitoes and the throbbing of his wound, he