Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [323]
THE ROOTS OF THE TREE
March–June 1802
Que La France envoie des forces ici, que feront-elles? Rien. Je voudrais qu’elle envoyât trois, quatre, ou cinq cent mille hommes; ce serait autant de fusils et de munitions pour nos frères qui ne sont pas armés. Quand nous avons commencé à battre pour notre liberté, nous n’avions qu’un fusil, et puis deux, trois et avons fini par avoir tous ceux des Français qui sont venus ici. Ainsi si l’on en envoie des autres, ce seront des armes pour remplacer les vieilles.
—Moyse, Mémoires de Général Kerverseau
Let France send her forces here, what will they do? Nothing. I wish they would send three, four, or five hundred thousand men: it would be that many more guns and that much more ammunition for our brothers who are not armed. When we began to fight for our freedom, we had but one gun, and then two, and then three, and we finished by having all of the guns of the French who came here. So if they send more, that will only be arms to replace the old ones.
31
The ash in the shell of Elise’s house had been settled by the rains, and much of it already shoveled away. In what had been the back garden, Michau and another man worked a saw twice as long as either of them was tall, patiently rocking it through the length of a huge log. One by one, they were trimming new timbers to span the fire-blackened masonry wall, and cutting planks to rebuild floors. Paul had been helping them until twenty minutes before, when his mother had told him to get out of the afternoon heat and also, by the way, to write his weekly letter.
We are building back Tante Elise’s house, Papa, he wrote. Madame Isabelle is building her house also. Even though Monsieur Bertrand is dead, Madame Isabelle is making her house faster than we are making Tante Elise’s house, and she says that it will be even grander than it was before the fire.
He paused, went back and scored out the clause Monsieur Bertrand is dead, so heavily that the blot made the paper soggy. Then he stopped writing altogether and listened to the noise of the saw. The garden had been razed by the fire, but a row of bananes loup-garou, which Elise had planted on a whim, had come back already, spreading broad leaves along the rear wall to make a little shade. Paul sat there, in a low wooden chair with a woven seat—they’d bought a dozen such, along with mats for sleeping, at the market which had regenerated on the ashes of the Place Clugny.
Paul tried to collect his concentration. The sentence still made sense without the clause he had gouged out, yet his mother would require him to recopy the whole because of this error, before she stored it in her flat straw sack, there being nowhere to send it. He wrote, Grâce, la miséricorde, Papa! We pray each day, I and Maman and my brothers, that you are safe and will soon return.
At this his thoughts scattered. François and Gabriel did not properly pray. They were too small for that devotion. And Nanon would object to the expostulation, Grâce, la miséricorde, for reasons too cloudy for Paul to follow, though he knew it would happen. His fingers twitched on the edge of his sheet. Before his eyes, the yellow cocotier, which had been burned, had managed to push up a pale green frond, and over this a blue dragonfly was hovering, delicate to the point of transparency. This vitality encouraged and at the same time somewhat frightened him; he was troubled because there was no reason for the fear.
A commotion began at the front of the house: Madame Isabelle had come, with news of an arrival at the harbor—they were all going down to see, Elise and Nanon and the children. Zabeth called into the back garden and Michau answered briefly before he went back to the sawing. Paul remained where he was, though he knew he would have been forgiven his task, for a time, if he ran to join this excursion. But . . . he had not seen his father since the battle at Ravine à Couleuvre. There he had expected to witness something like a tournament, but instead it had been more like a hog butchering—only with guns to add to the