Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [340]
I was not going to run away this time, in case Toussaint would have me shot when I came back. I would have to come back, I thought, because it looked like there was nowhere free in the whole country between Toussaint’s people in the mountains and the blancs on the coast. But I knew Toussaint would want to know what was happening on the road between Ennery and Gonaives and so I offered to go and see for him, and Toussaint accepted this offer.
Before I left, Guiaou gave me a big tortoise shell he had found in the woods to take to Yoyo at Thibodet, and a smaller one for Marielle. The small shell had the bottom piece along with the top and Guiaou had stopped the holes with clay, with pieces of the tortoise’s backbone still inside to make a rattle. When he had given me these things, Guiaou seemed happy enough to stay in the camp at Marmelade with Toussaint.
It was easy riding from Marmelade to Ennery, and I met no blancs at all on my way to Habitation Thibodet. I did not find anyone in Merbillay’s case when I got there at the end of the day, though I called and knocked on the edge of the doorway. When I stooped and went inside, the air of the room seemed as if no one had been breathing it for a long time, and almost all the things were gone except for the paillasses on the floor. My banza hung still from the roof pole. I took it down and touched a string and bent the sound with a finger of my left hand. The banza was dusty on the wooden neck and the gourd shell of its body. I carried it outside and sat down to play on the ground near where my horse was snuffling in the dust, until some children came. When I asked them where Merbillay had gone, they pointed down the hill to the grand’case.
By the time I had walked to the steps of the grand’case it was almost dark, and the stars were beginning to show above the hill where I had tied my horse. There was still enough light for me to see something moving in the pool the doctor had made there long ago. When I moved to look nearer, I was quick to jump back, because the thing which was there was a big cayman, resting among the flowers of bwa dlo. Only his eyes showed above the water, and two points of his nose, and I thought I could see the shadow of his body just underneath. I thought he was more than six feet long. But then it was too dark to see, and someone was lighting the lamps on the gallery.
When I turned toward the light, there was Merbillay, holding the burning splint in her hand for the lamps. She was wearing her finest headcloth, the one with the gold fringes, to swirl her hair on the top of her head, and she had on one of the blanche Elise’s dresses.
“Bienvenu, mon capitaine,” she said. When I came up the steps she gave me a courtesy, like a blanche. Sometimes Elise gave Merbillay her old dresses, but what she wore tonight was a new one. When she gave me her hand, it was dry and cool and pulled a little way from mine. Everything she had been doing unfolded all at once inside my head.
Merbillay was staying in the bedroom of Tocquet and Elise, which was the best room in the house. She had put Caco in the other room at the front, where sometimes the doctor would stay, and the smaller children in the back where Zabeth used to keep the babies. Zabeth had gone off with the blancs to Le Cap, and something had made Merbillay believe that this time they were not ever coming back to Thibodet.
She had made a fine meal to serve at the table of the blancs on the gallery. As Captain Riau of Toussaint’s army, I had sat down at that table sometimes before. This night I sat to eat with Merbillay and the children. The food was even better than what she cooked for the blancs, lambi with green cashews and rice cooked with cinnamon and milk. Some other people who were living at the grand’case sat down to eat with us, while others served the table as Zabeth used to do. The grand’case was all full of people who