Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [350]
“Sa ou gegne pou nou manjé?” Riau said. What have you got for us to eat?
“Pa gegne anyen anko.” Cléo shrugged. There’s nothing left. The doctor’s stomach grumbled at this remark. His avocados, he recalled, had dispersed themselves among Romain’s men. He searched for expression in Cléo’s handsome ivory face, but found no hostility, only disinterest. He put his head into the house. The air smelled damp and rather uninviting.
“Take any room except the first,” Cléo said from where she sat.
“Thank you,” said the doctor. His throat itched for rum. Riau appeared at his right hand.
“We can go down to look for Moustique,” he said. “If they start that bamboche again, we may find something.”
The four of them retraced their steps down the trail by which they’d come. As they neared the cane mill, the doctor noticed other shadows milling ahead of him, beyond the building, and caught the sharp smell of fermenting cane. Arnaud’s distillery was in service. His mood began to brighten.
“Have you got money?” Maillart whispered in his ear.
“Of course,” said the doctor. Maillart pressed his shoulder. Brushed by damp branches, they reached the distillery’s coils. A line had formed for gourds of fresh clairin. The doctor found a coin to pay for his.
“Santé,” he said, swallowing as he passed the container to Maillart, who drank and passed it to Riau. Guizot hesitated when the gourd reached him from Riau’s hand, then took it and drank his measure and coughed.
“Dousman alé loin,” Maillart said unexpectedly. He clapped Guizot on the back, then moved past him, returning toward the open ground beyond the cane mill on the trail they’d come by. Guizot looked to the doctor for some explanation.
“It means . . . don’t drink your rum too fast,” the doctor said. He collected the gourd, took another small swallow, and stopped it with the plug of rolled leaves. Guizot was still looking at him, his starved face pale in the starlight.
“Or, ‘the softer you go the sooner you’ll get there,’ ” the doctor said. “That would be another way to put it. It is one of Toussaint’s favorite proverbs. Along with patiens bat lafòs.”
“Patience beats force?” Guizot’s laugh was harsh, incredulous. He shook his head, then fell in behind the doctor, who was following Riau and Maillart.
Unerringly Riau led them toward the smell of roasting goat. A boucan had been set up among the little cases by the church, and women were serving out peppered goat with plantains baked whole in their skins. Romain’s men got their portions first, and Riau with them; the three blancs lagged a little behind and were served among the women and the children.
Then they drifted toward the sound of the drums, each balancing a shiny green plantain leaf which did duty as a plate. Guizot bit into a piece of his goat and choked on the peppery gravy.
“Dousman alé loin,” Maillart chided him again. There was the slightest edge of hysteria in the laugh Guizot returned. The doctor looked at him with a distant concern. In this country, a mind too singular was easy to break.
A few people seemed to look askance at Guizot’s uniform—there was enough firelight here and there to make it more visible than might have been preferred—but any hostile muttering was soon hushed. Maillart and the doctor were already reasonably well known in these parts, and Romain’s safe-conduct seemed to hold for all three blancs here. Besides, the mood was sufficiently amiable. It was a bamboche, as Riau had said, a party of pleasure rather than any more serious ceremony. A wooden fife carried a melody above the drums, and the airs it played were old French country dances, though grafted onto rhythms out of Africa. Riau, who’d dispatched his meal very quickly, had stepped out to dance with one of the girls. The doctor felt Guizot begin to soften beside him, under the influence of hot food and drink. The young captain had been tense as a terrier all day, and such an effort was exhausting.
The doctor cleaned his fingers as best he could on the plantain leaf