Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [344]
“The spirit will pardon you that, if it is so,” said Quamba.
All at once I felt a weight come off my back, and the irons in my hands grew very warm. I felt again what it had been like when Riau struck the irons from Bouquart’s feet, but this feeling was mixed with a picture of Bouquart shooting a bullet through his own head at Toussaint’s order, and Toussaint seemed to be watching too as the hammer struck the iron from Riau’s throat when Riau was brought a slave to Bréda. That part was so long ago I could not be sure. I had not then known Toussaint’s name.
“Toussaint may be for freedom, and yet still deal with the blancs,” Quamba said, like he could see everything in my head clear as if it were written on the ground between us. “That was always Toussaint’s way.”
“I am tired of those twisted ways,” I said. “Moyse’s way was simpler.”
Quamba followed my eyes through the door of the kay mystè where the cannari of Moyse and Bouquart stood silent and invisible among the others.
“Moyse has gone beneath the waters,” he said. “Toussaint is still here.”
The iron grew warmer in my hands and spread its warmth to the bottoms of my feet. Quamba wrapped his hands around my head and set his fingertips in the place where my head hinged to my neck. “Ki jan ou yé?” he said. How are you?
“Nou la,” I said. We’re here. I meant not only Riau and Quamba but the spirits of Moyse and Bouquart too, if they were silent, and above them Ogûn, the master of my head, Ogûn Feraille. Ogûn was there with a quiet strength, different from his strength for cutting. He had not turned Riau completely out of his head but was there, sharing the head with me so that I did not feel uncertain.
I knew Riau would go back to Toussaint, but that would be another day. Merbillay was there when I came back to the case from the hûnfor. No one would know she had been away, except that she was still taking a few of her things out of a bundle. There were some crabs boiling in a pot with hot peppers on a small hot fire behind the case, enough for us and the three children. When I slept that night touching Merbillay, I did not dream of any cayman, though probably that cayman was still waiting at the bottom of the pool. It was a good thing that Merbillay had left the grand’case, because the next day the blancs did come back to Thibodet after all, not Elise or Tocquet, but Doctor Hébert and Maillart, with some other soldiers.
33
“Elise!” the doctor called. “Elise?” He continued further into the hall of the Thibodet grand’case, glancing into the rooms on either side. “Zabeth?”
The bare boards echoed back at him. He felt the abandonment of the house. And there was something else, not disarray exactly, but rearrangement. The bedrooms he peered into all looked to have been pulled apart and then quite recently reassembled. The difference was subtle, hard to identify. He stepped out onto the gallery in back.
“Merbillay?”
But there was no one in the kitchen compound behind the grand’case. The blackened fire circle was cold outside the vacant shed. He turned back into the house. Framed in the front doorway at the far end of the hall was the figure of Major Maillart, fists to his hips, waiting for some service or acknowledgment. Then the major paced away from the door, leaving a vacant square of morning light.
The doctor would not call Nanon’s name aloud. It struck him as unlucky to do it. He didn’t want that name to echo back with no response. She was not here. No one was here. Spiders shimmered in their webs in the high corners of every room. Most of Nanon’s clothes remained in her armoire, but she had always been inclined to travel light.
“Antoine!” Maillart’s voice, urgent, from outside. Beyond came a wordless, astonished shout from Bienvenu.
“Antoine!” Maillart called, “come quickly!” The doctor rushed onto the gallery. A dragon was heaving itself out of the pool, crushing the long stalks of bwa dlo to either side, or no, it was a great cayman—the largest he had ever seen. It moved deliberately toward