Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [32]
“What an extraordinary article,” she said. It seemed to her that each carved skull was just a little different from all the others.
“It came to me as a spoil of war,” Toussaint said and put the rosary into his pocket, without telling her what other thing it might have come to mean to him now.
Outside she heard voices, the clucking of chickens as they scuttled for shelter. The wind rose further, as the air grew chill with the coming rain.
“Ah well,” said Toussaint. “We have our dead.”
All at once Claudine’s leg stopped trembling and her raised foot relaxed against the floor. How intimately she had her dead! She wondered if Toussaint was similarly placed, sometimes, or always. It was certain that he’d caused the deaths of many more than the considerable number he’d ushered out of the world with his own hands.
“Yes,” she burst out. “My husband killed many before the risings—he killed the children of Guinée with no more regard than for ants or for flies, and with torture sometimes, as bad as that—” She flung out her arm toward the crucifix. “Yes, this morning you rode your horse through the place where there once stood a pole, and to that pole my husband used to nail his victims, to die slowly as they hung—like that—” Her rigid fingers thrust toward the cross again. “And there was worse, still worse than that. No doubt you know it—he was famous for it all.” Her whole arm dropped, and she felt her face twisting, that alien sensation as she moved a step farther away from her body. The blood beat heavy in her temples, and she heard the other voice beginning to come out from behind her head. “Four hundred years of abominations—four hundred years for all to endure, and his no larger than a grain among them—”
She stopped the voice, and came back to herself—she wanted now to remain herself. Toussaint had leaned back a little away from her and regarded her with his chin cupped in one hand.
“During the risings my husband suffered very much,” Claudine said. “For a time he was made clean by suffering, as fire will burn corruption from the bone. Oh, he has still cruelty in his nature, and avarice, and too much pride, with contempt for others, white or black, but now he fights against it. I see him fight it every day.”
Her voice cracked from hoarseness; her throat felt very dry.
“And yourself, Madame?”
She took it for an answer to the prayer she could not voice. With a lurch she dropped to her knees on the space of packed dirt between them, embraced his legs, and pushed her face into his lap.
“Hear my confession,” she said, but her voice was too muffled to be understood. Toussaint was pushing her back by the shoulders.
“Madame, Madame,” he said. “Control your feeling.”
“No,” Claudine said. “No—I want to touch you not in the flesh but in the spirit.” But she had grasped his wrists now, to hold his hands firm against her collarbones.
“Hear my confession,” she said, clearly now.
“I am no priest,” Toussaint informed her. He twisted his hands free and drew them back. “You have your own priest here, who must confess you.”
Claudine’s arms dropped slack to her sides. To her surprise, he reached for her again, wrapping both hands around her head, balancing it on the point where his fingertips joined in the deepest hollow at the back of her neck.
“It is not easy to enter the spiritual world,” he said. From the soft and absent tone of his voice, he might have been talking to himself. But he was looking into her head as if it were transparent to him.
“So you have been walking to the drum, my child,” he said. “Sometimes there is a spirit who dances in your head.”
The release of his hands let go a flash of light behind her eyes. The wind had blown the bead strings apart and was stirring the dust under the benches around them.
Toussaint cocked his head. “Lapli k’ap vini,” he said. The rain is coming.
“Yes, you are right,” Claudine murmured. “We must go up before we are caught here.”
Outside, the sky bulged purple over them, and above the mountains a wire of silent lightning glowed and vanished.