Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [35]
“I have heard that the rum of Saint Domingue is very wonderful,” he said.
“It has been so long,” Placide said, somewhat coldly. “I don’t remember.” In fact he had been forbidden to drink rum by his father, though once he had made himself drunk and ill on tafia stolen by older boys. At the recollection, he felt again the sick dizziness and the prickling numbness of his face.
Daspir did not seem to be put off. He rolled his soft shoulders forward and back under his military coat, pressed up on the rail to stretch his spine. “There’s a change in the air,” he said. “Do you not think—” He broke off and raised his arm to point. “Look, look there.”
Placide squinted but there was nothing to see on the western horizon but a low bank of cloud.
“Birds,” Daspir breathed out, as if in rapture. Then Placide saw something swirling up from the cloud bank, a smoke-like current of vaguely moving specks. Someone else had shouted indistinctly from the bow.
“Land birds, they are,” Daspir said, and turned on Placide a glowing smile. “I’m certain of it—and the land cannot be far.”
In the early afternoon Major Maillart, riding in the midst of a squad of Toussaint’s honor guard, reached the crossing of the roads to Ouanaminthe and Fort Liberté. Here an ancient woman sat beneath a rickety shelter made of crooked sticks and broad flat leaves, with rows of green coconuts and bananas spread on the ground before her. These comestibles must have been carried some distance, since an almost treeless plain expanded all around the crossroads as far as the eye could see, to the ocean in one direction and the mountains in the other.
Couachy, who led the squad, called a halt and purchased six green coconuts. With short chopping blows of his saber he opened each one and handed it around. The men shared the thin sweet liquor before breaking the shells apart for the white meat.
Maillart bought a stalk of bananes Ti-Malice and immediately broke off four of them for the two small boys who were crawling around the old woman’s low stool. The children sat up and stared at him, too shy to peel their fruit. Maillart ate a couple of the bananas himself—each about the size of his thumb—and offered them to the other men, but still two-thirds of the stalk was left for him to tie at his saddlebow before remounting.
They rode in the direction of Ouanaminthe, maintaining a gentle trot. Toussaint had outfitted the two thousand men of his personal guard with the best horses on the island; they ate up the ground relentlessly. The road was pinkish dust and the plain surrounding it almost featureless except for a few longhorned cattle grazing over the pasture. Bœuf marron,Couachy muttered, whenever he saw one of these, wild beef. His eyes lit up with appetite.
Maillart was adrift in his own restless humor. He carried a note from Tocquet to Toussaint, announcing the arrival of the muskets, but this was a matter of no great urgency—boatloads of guns hove into the Le Cap harbor almost every day, it seemed. The truth was, he’d wanted to get out of town. The arrival of Isabelle’s children had disrupted his amours, though of course it was only natural for her to dote upon them after such a terribly long separation. The children, who might have half-forgotten her during their long absence, were rather cool to her at first. She won back Héloïse, the younger, easily enough, but Robert remained aloof. It was absurd to be jealous of a twelve-year-old boy! . . . and yet Maillart had felt that sting.
The worst was that Isabelle wasn’t doing it to torment him, as in her sometime dalliances with other swains. No, this time she was not thinking about Maillart at all. Possibly there’d be no coals to discover under the ashes this time around, supposing her attention ever returned. After all, Isabelle was far from her first youth, he reflected, and there was always the modestly inconvenient matter of her husband.