Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [332]
Paul’s hand slipped away from the crank. Tante Elise had interrupted Madame Leclerc with questions: Where had this doctor gone to now? Did anyone happen to know his name? But Paul attended only to his mother, who’d forgotten both her sewing and her usual sidewise decorum; she was looking at Madame Leclerc head on, with her lips slightly parted and her eyes warm and bright.
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No one knew which spirit was walking with Toussaint, or at least I, Riau, I did not know it. No one had ever known for certain what spirit was master of his head, and maybe Toussaint wanted to be always his own master, like a blanc. He would not give his head completely up to any lwa. Always in the days of Bréda, and afterward when he was strong, Toussaint talked of Jesus as if Jesus was his only one. But Jesus was the spirit of the blancs. I, Riau, had not been there at Gonaives, but those who were had told the story—how Toussaint tore Jesus down from the cross, and cursed him and rode over him with the hooves of his big horse Bel Argent, before he set fire to the church. And still before I heard this story, I knew that Toussaint had his other lwa, but he was always secret in that thing.
After La Crête à Pierrot had fallen, and the French blanc soldiers were swarming all over the place where our people had been, Toussaint’s eyes were rimmed with red, and he was twisted up with rage and sorrow. There, as at Ravine à Couleuvre, the battle had not gone as he planned or wanted. The French blanc soldiers had left many dead around La Crête à Pierrot, much more than we, even after they had killed all our wounded they found lying in the fort when Lamartinière had gone. They had lost so many that the General Lacroix had to march back to Port-au-Prince with wide empty spaces hidden in the inside of his column, so the weakness did not show. But I, Riau, heard that from Maillart a long time afterward, so maybe Toussaint did not know it either. Whatever he knew, it seemed that all those dead blanc soldiers were not enough to feed the spirit that was with him then.
One saw that day that he was old, and tired from his long riding and hard fighting, though the spirit that was in him forced him on. I thought that Ezili Jé Rouj was with him that day, after Lamartinière received Dessalines’s ring and fought his way out of the fort with the men he had still able—she who would claw at her own face and maybe even tear her own eyes out when things had not passed as she wished them to. No man should be too long with Ezili Jé Rouj, for she is one to ride her horse to death when she is angry, and she is almost always angry, but Toussaint rode under her as far as the mountain east of La Crête à Pierrot, Morne Calvaire, where Dessalines had finally come.
Then Toussaint’s eyes were red and furious and his mouth was bitter when he spoke. If Dessalines had waited only one more day to send his ring to Lamartinière, then Toussaint might have struck the French from behind their lines, and Dessalines too from the other side, so that they would have killed every blanc in the French army, or at least have captured the Captain-General Leclerc. Dessalines listened without saying anything back, but his knuckles were gray on the snuffbox he clutched in his left hand, and I saw what it cost him to keep his tongue still. He had fought as hard in those last weeks as Toussaint or anyone, except perhaps for Lamartinière and the others who had been trapped in the fort, and I saw too that he was getting sick from fever.
But the spirit of anger left Toussaint, and he smiled on Dessalines, and spoke to him more calmly. Dessalines was too strong a leader for Toussaint to treat him poorly now. Toussaint sent Dessalines down to Marchand where he could cover the road that ran from Saint Marc to Le Cap through the Savane Désolée. But we rode on into the Petit Cahos, where Toussaint’s family was. During that ride, we stopped in the day’s worst heat at Toussaint’s habitation at La Coupe à l’Inde, where