Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [342]
“You can sleep here,” I said. “There is still room enough for you.”
Then Quamba got up and went away and the children scattered, all but Caco, who came into the case with me and Jean-Pic. I let the cloth fall across the doorway and stretched out on a paillasse. The cloth held a pale milky light across the door. I could hear Jean-Pic and Caco breathing not far off, although it was too dark to see them.
“Too much fighting in the north,” Jean-Pic said. “I went to Grande Rivière to get away from the blancs, but Sans-Souci found me and made me fight them still.”
I heard Jean-Pic’s head shaking against the straw of his paillasse. “Woy!” he said. “Sans-Souci likes to fight too hard. With him, you have to beat the blancs or die. And they are tough, those new blanc soldiers.”
“Lamour Dérance has left the blancs,” I told him. “I heard it from Chancy. He took all his people back from Port-au-Prince to the mountains. He was angry because the blancs arrested Rigaud and took his sword and sent him away to France.”
“I heard they did that, in the north,” Jean-Pic said. “I don’t care anything about Rigaud. Rigaud is the same as a blanc to me.”
“Yes,” I said. “But he is not the same as a blanc to the blancs.”
“I would like to see Matilde again,” Jean-Pic said. Matilde was the woman he had in Lamour Dérance’s band. “Maybe I will go and look for Lamour Dérance, if he has gone back to the mountains.”
Jean-Pic was chewing his beard in the dark. “What I would really like is to go back to Bahoruco,” he said. “If the blancs have not run all over it already, or people fighting the blancs. ”
He didn’t say anything more after that, and so we slept. My sleep gave me a foolish dream about a cayman sitting at the table on the gallery of the Thibodet grand’case, eating a chicken with a fork. In my dream it troubled me that the chicken still had all its feathers, and was bleeding on the tablecloth. All the chairs were standing on their heads, like the chests and the bed in the bedroom. I woke thinking these were the thoughts the blanche Elise might have, if she saw how Merbillay had turned her house all upside down, but how had these thoughts come into Riau’s head? In the old days Riau would have killed every blanc in a house like that and burned it down and danced on the ashes and never dreamed about it.
But it was pleasant to hear Caco breathing near me in the dark. When I slept again, I slept without dreaming.
Next morning Jean-Pic had decided to go south. He could not get a horse at Ennery, or even a donkey. They had all been taken off by the French blanc soldiers or ours. I rode him double on my horse as far as the crossroads where the road from Ennery strikes the big road up the coast. The mango sellers at that kalfou told us that a lot of French blanc soldiers were coming up the road, so we hid my horse in the ravine of the river of Ennery and crept up to the roadside to watch from behind the trees. A lot of soldiers did come marching up the road from Le Cap, and Captain-General Leclerc himself was leading them.
Jean-Pic went south when they had passed, on foot, among a gang of marchandes who were taking fruit to Gonaives. They were singing as they went, but I did not want to go any nearer to Gonaives that day. I bought mangoes and took them to Merbillay’s case. I found Caco to watch my horse, and then I took off my boots and walked with my bare feet to the top of the hill where the hûnfor was.
Quamba’s woman was sweeping the ground when I came in. She smiled at me, and laid down her broom and went away. I sat down on the hard dirt of the peristyle, under the square red flag that snapped on its long pole in the dry wind. The door to the kay mystè was open. Inside in the shadows I could see the new cannari we had made, though which was for Bouquart and which for Moyse I could not tell. I did not feel the konesans I thought I used to have.
After a while, Quamba