Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [295]
The departure of Dessalines left Descourtilz more cheerful, though Doctor Hébert was not so much encouraged by it. Siege tedium weighed upon him drearily. Both food and water were running short. At first, some of the more daring black soldiers managed to slip to and from the river at night, but in a few days French maneuvers had closed that breach and the next water-foraging party did not return. With water rationing, the wounded did poorly; many had begun to die.
Lamartinière had put his men to cutting brush around the redoubt. Their long knives hacked through the heat of the day, clearing broader fields of fire. Outside this new perimeter, the doctor was sometimes allowed to ramble, in search of healing herbs to replenish his stores. Sometimes Descourtilz went with him, and always Bienvenu and one other man from the black army, though this other man changed from one excursion to the next. Meanwhile, Lamartinière’s men had finished their clearing and turned to deepening the ditch around the redoubt. The doctor knew that Descourtilz’s mind was on escape, but there was no such possibility. Even Bienvenu would sound the alarm, and the second man was there in case Bienvenu should waver.
The slope below the fort heaved with vultures’ wings from dawn to dusk, and a greasy black smoke bled into the air from the ravines below Petite Rivière. At dusk, sometimes the dogs returned, their heavy brindled shoulders hunching. Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière picked off a few of them with her long gun, until her husband told her to stop wasting ammunition. Thereafter she only stared at the dogs balefully, her two hands twitching on her hips.
One afternoon the doctor was shocked out of his siesta by the crump of a single artillery piece from the direction of the town. With Descourtilz he hurried to the wall beside the gate, to see a heavy iron sphere loft into the air, fall short, and roll back down the slope, its fuse whipping and spitting sparks. When the shell went off, the nearby corpses jumped; a dozen vultures lumbered into the air and circled.
The doctor snatched out the joints of his folding spyglass and brought it to his eye. In the lens’s round he could make out the figure of Pétion, lately returned from his exile in France, directing the adjustment of the obusier. When the match was lit, the doctor had a great impulse to flinch, though he knew there was no point. Descourtilz nudged his elbow, and the doctor passed him the glass. The second shell was flying over their heads; it landed squarely within the fort and spun with its fuse sizzling.
Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière moved toward it as quickly as any of the men, but Magny caught her arm and held her back. A couple of horses whinnied nervously, edging against their tethers by the upper wall. The doctor watched, half frozen; it seemed to have been instantly understood by all that no water could be wasted on extinguishing this thing. Three men hauled it off the ground and began to carry it toward the nearest embrasure. There was a moment of awkwardness because a cannon was in the way. One man was blown to indecipherable bits when the shell went off, showering the bystanders with blood and ribbons of shredded flesh. A second, who’d lost his grip in falling over the gun carriage, was not hurt at all, while the third had his two hands hopelessly mangled. The doctor found his breath and ran to stanch the bleeding, almost colliding with Marie-Jeanne, who’d rushed in with the same purpose.
Lamartinière’s redoubt was now returning fire, effectively enough to silence the obusier, at least temporarily. Pétion would doubtless be trying to move this gun to some more advantageous position. As for the shattered hands, there was no saving either one of them. He found his