Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [303]
30
The red mouchwa têt Guiaou had given to Placide was plastered to his head with sweat and caked with dust. On the shortened staff wedged in the scabbard by his left knee, the French tricolor he’d wrested from Daspir hung slack. At day’s end it was still very hot, and the air heavy. He rode four places back in Morisset’s cavalry column, down the switchbacks leading to the pocket in the hills which held the town of Marmelade. Above the horses, swirls of reddish dust rose into the setting sun like smoke.
Toussaint waited, as if expecting them. He’d set a camp table under an ancient almond tree at the edge of the town square. Placide dismounted, finding his legs gone soft beneath him. Guiaou, who’d stepped out from Toussaint’s side to catch the reins of his horse, sustained Placide with a hand beneath his shoulder. He smiled to see that Placide wore the headcloth, and Placide, from the depths of his fatigue, did his best to return the smile.
He would have gone to Toussaint then, but Morisset was ahead of him, saluting before the camp table, then sitting down at Toussaint’s gesture, to commence making his report. Placide turned aside and led his horse to water. Guiaou caught up the reins before the horse could drink too deeply, and began to lead it slowly around the perimeter of the square. Placide sank down and crossed his legs, beneath a yellow palm. Presently he unknotted the red cloth from his head and rinsed it in the stone basin of the well and squeezed a little cool water from it: a drop on his wrists and temples and the hollow at the base of his skull. In the twilight a little breeze began and cooled him further, but the air was still so harshly arid that the red cloth dried quickly. He folded it into a small neat triangle and held it under his hand on his right knee.
He only knew that he had dozed when he heard the church bell ringing. Startled, he scrambled to his feet, slipping the red cloth into his trouser pocket. Now Toussaint came to him, wordlessly kissed both his cheeks, and led him to the church. Placide sat on the front bench between his father and his officers: Morisset and Monpoint, Gabart and Pourcely. His head was still heavy; the readings and chants of the vespers service braided into dream images that rushed upon him whenever his eyes slid shut: the upward rush of foot soldiers’ faces as his horse crashed down on them, the endless serpentine coils of the mountain trails, and suspended at each turn a wooden skull like those on the rosary Toussaint manipulated with one hand while the priest intoned the scripture . . . then suddenly, a vista of the sea, and the wounded sphinx-like face of Lasirène turning her half-human countenance toward him, then away, disappearing beneath the waters with a pump of the jeweled flukes of her tail.
Morisset roused him with a nudge, to take communion. The dream image still glittered behind his eyes as he knelt before the chalice and the plate, and it seemed that it organized all his confusion into sense. But at the taste of sour wine he lost the sense of it. He got up and followed his father and the others out of the church. They were all going in to supper, but Toussaint held him back a little, beneath the almond tree.
“What can you tell me of what you have seen?” he asked.
“But you must have already heard it all from Morisset,” Placide replied, dismayed at a tinge of querulousness he heard in his own tone.
Toussaint covered his mouth with his hand. It was full dark now, and the wind shivered the branches of the almond tree.
“From Morisset I heard that you disobeyed my order and rode to Gonaives from Grand Morne on the night after we drove the enemy back from Périsse.”
“Forgive me.” Placide lowered his head. A couple of almonds had fallen in that rising wind; he pushed the fleshy pod of one through the dust with his boot toe. “I could not stop myself.”
Toussaint took his hand away from his jaw. “Morisset has also told me that you acquitted yourself very well at