Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [306]
“It does us no credit to molest such crippled simpletons, or rob them of their treasures,” Lacroix said. “Let him have his ring, and let them go.”
A little sullen at this rebuke, the post commander opened the loop of string between his hands. The old man turtled his head through it, whimpering a little as if this movement pained him. The ring dropped into the hollow of his collarbone. Then the sergeant handed him his cane.
“So,” Lacroix snorted. “You were beating him with his own stick?” But the sergeant did not seem to hear him; he had turned away to button up the tunic he’d resumed.
Daspir watched the old couple creep toward the bank of the river, leaning heavily on their canes, both of them bent almost double. The bombardment had not yet recommenced, and the ringing in his ears had almost stopped. It was here that the rebels of the fort had come for water, until the establishment of this post put a stop to it. Now the light was flat on the river’s snake-like turning and a wind riffle on the water had a scaly glitter. The old man and old woman had waded chest-deep. Feeble as they were, they must surely drown, Daspir was thinking. But the movement of the water seemed somehow to ease their limbs.
“They swim quite well for a pair of cripples,” Maillart remarked.
Lacroix was staring, his lips parted, though he did not yet speak. Daspir noticed that the old couple had relinquished their canes and let them drift downstream away from them. When they came out on the opposite bank, it was as if they’d been bathed in the fountain of youth. They jumped to their feet and began dancing the chica, bumping hips and bellies and buttocks, shouting a stream of insults at the French across the river.
“Shoot them!” Lacroix slapped his palm against his trouser leg. A volley began, but to little effect. The old couple were running with startling agility up the difficult slope from the riverbank to the fort, the old man displaying the exuberant capers and bounds of a young goat. Bullets thumped into the ground all around them, but none of them found the target. The fort’s gate opened, and someone ran a plank across the ditch to let them cross.
While Lacroix and the post commander were expostulating with each other, Daspir turned quietly to Maillart. “I thought you recognized that ring,” he said.
“I may have done,” Maillart said thoughtfully. “I may have seen it on the hand of General Dessalines.”
At the notorious name, Daspir felt a cold shock in his vitals. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know,” Maillart said, and turned his face up to the fort. “You’d do as well to ask me why they sing the same songs in there as we do.”
To that, Daspir had no reply. No one else in their small group had anything more to say, as they rode disconsolately along the riverbank toward the next post. Soon the bombardment began again, covering their silence. Daspir had tended to attach himself to Maillart since they’d first met in these killing fields. The man had likely saved his life, after all, and even without that, though Cyprien and Paltre despised him no little for his long moldering in colonial service, Daspir saw the value in Maillart’s experience, and besides he instinctively liked his ways. It would be very unpleasant not to be able to trust him.
Doctor Hébert had not slept in three days. His eyes were wedged open by a combination of hunger and torturing thirst and by the mad unpredictability of the bombardment. They shelled two or three times a night, with little accuracy but frequently enough to break the rest of everyone in the garrison. By day the shells did much more damage, and at whatever hour they started to land, the fort’s defenders all began to swirl within the walls, looking for shelter, though there was little to be found; they could only swim in circles like fish in a barrel.
A fresh bombardment began a little after dawn. In the moments following the discharge of the obusier, the doctor’s heart clenched tight and his airways constricted. He was