Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [324]
He signed his love to the letter and folded it hastily, smudging the ink of the last lines. With the letter in his hand he went out into the street. No one had noticed his departure, and if they had they would have thought he was going to the fort. Instead he went up the hill, through the Place Montarcher, where the fountain had again been set flowing. A few black women glanced his way incuriously as they lifted their water jars to their heads. He passed them, stepping out quickly despite the heat, and hurried past the heat-wracked iron gates of the Government compound, hoping to outdistance the fear that shamed him. He was nearly nine years old.
As a smaller child, he’d lost both parents for a time. Nanon had taken him when she went away to live with another man, a pale colored man with lots of freckles, in the days when Doctor Hébert was no more to Paul than a pleasant human smell and a warm touch. This freckled man had treated him with a careful consideration that masked his dislike, and one day he had taken him to Le Cap without his mother. He’d told Nanon that Paul was to be put into a school, but he said nothing at all to Paul on the whole journey down from the mountains, and they did not go to any school, but instead to a bad house, where the bodies of women were sold to men, though Paul had not understood that part until later. He had understood much sooner that he would not survive there, and so he had run away after a while, and lived as a beggar in the streets of Le Cap. Not in the fashionable precincts where he was walking now, for here he found nowhere to hide himself, but further down, in the banlieuesbetween Marché Clugny and the graveyards of La Fossette.
He turned downhill from the Rue Espagnole and found the crooked trail that climbed the brow of Morne Calvaire. Somehow the little cases that lined this shaly path had escaped the torches of Christophe’s soldiers. These days, the inhabitants were furnishing their labor to the reconstruction of other parts of the town, though most of them were sleeping now, through the hottest part of the afternoon. Paul was not suffering, despite the effort of the climb, though he felt a little lightheaded by the time he reached the top. He stopped by the three wooden crosses that stood before the shell of the church, and turned into the wind to cool himself. He looked back down the path, as for a shadow.
Caco had told him stories of the djab, bad spirits astray that might pursue and torment a person, most often by night but sometimes even by day. Paul missed Caco, who had stayed behind at Ennery. Neither had found anything to say to the other about what they had seen at Ravine à Couleuvre. If Caco missed his own father, and Riau was mysteriously absent from his lakou more often than not, he never said anything about that either. Now, as Paul looked down the empty trail he’d climbed, it came to him that his djab today was no more than a thought that he could not properly identify, though he knew it was bound up with the letter and the impossibility of sending it. Nanon kept all his letters in her special flat macoute, against the day his father would return.
A sighing sound rose from the waterfront, and Paul raised his eyes to see. A crowd had gathered along the embarcadère, and all the people sighed in gratification, as Madame Leclerc was borne ashore in a litter, from the shallop that had carried her from her ship moored in the