Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [341]
When we had finished all the food, I gave Guiaou’s shell to Yoyo and Marielle. Yoyo ran away under the starlight toward the spring high on the hill, because she wanted to try her shell for a water dipper. Marielle went inside the grand’case, shaking her shell against her ear and smiling. Then everyone else went away from the table, and Merbillay asked me to come with her into the bedroom of the blancs, but I would not go.
“If you are afraid of the blancs,” she said, “they will not be coming back any more.”
I did not give her an answer to that. All the plates were still on the table between us, sticky with milk and oil from the food. There would be flies in the morning, if no one took them away. Maybe what Merbillay thought was true and the blancs were finished in this country, but if that was coming it had not happened yet. Maybe her picture of the future was true, but that picture had not yet come clear. Nothing was clear. If Toussaint had raised too much trouble for ordinary blancs to travel to Ennery, still Xavier Tocquet would go anywhere he wanted to go, with Bazau and Gros-Jean, or alone if he wanted. But that was not the reason I would not sleep in the grand’case. I had thought about lying down with Merbillay for many days before I left Marmelade, but I did not want to lie in the bed of the blancs and be covered with the fatras of their old dreams.
“You make good food, like you always do.” I rubbed my stomach with one hand and smiled as I stood up. “I will be in our old case whenever you want to find me.” Then I kissed her hand, like a blanc myself, before I went away.
There was a pull in the bottom of my belly that made my legs want to turn around and go back to her as I climbed up the hill, but I thought maybe it was better to keep away from any woman for a few more days, so that maybe my spirit would come back to me. I could not think what moved Merbillay to start living in the grand’case as she had done. Maybe there was a third man in it somewhere, but I had not seen any sign of that, and Merbillay was not the kind of woman who would hide it.
I took the banza out into the starlight and sat down near the door to play it. Some of the same children who were there in the afternoon came to listen, and in a little while Caco came too, and sat down so near me that his shoulder was touching my shoulder. Then we heard Quamba’s bone flute whistling in the dark and coming nearer, and Quamba crossed his legs to sit down and play until we had finished the tune. Quamba let the flute drop on the string that held it around his neck, and I leaned the banza against the wall of the case.
“I have been dreaming, or there is a big cayman in the pool by the grand’case,” I said.
Caco laughed and rolled his head against the wall.
“You can laugh,” I said. “But that is dangerous for the little children, like your sisters. Why does no one kill this cayman?”
“All the guns have gone away to shoot blancs,” Quamba said. “If you want to kill a cayman that big with a knife, Riau, you are welcome.”
“He is not hungry.” Caco could not stop laughing. “Maman gives him a chicken every day. Or sometimes the leg of a goat.”
“Well,” I said. “I am glad there are chickens enough at Thibodet to feed a cayman.” Of course I had my pistols with me, so I could shoot the cayman myself if he was there by daylight, but I thought maybe I would leave him alone.
Then Jean-Pic came out of the darkness toward our case. He was almost at the door before he noticed that Riau was there.
“I thought you had gone north, to our old country,” I said to him. Jean-Pic and I had been maroons together long before, in the hills around the edges of the big plain outside Le Cap.
“I was in the north,” Jean-Pic said. “But there was too much trouble, so I came back here. I didn’t see you there, Riau.”
“It looks like you saw where my bed was,” I said, but I was smiling in the dark.
“Oh,” said Jean-Pic, “I was sleeping in the ajoupa of Michau, because he went north with Zabeth