Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [365]
Alone, the doctor watched them down the street. It was the first time Guizot had been separated from him since he’d begun treating the arrow wound, and even now the captain allowed himself a backward glance over his shoulder. The doctor knew he ought to get out of the sun. His horse had shoved itself up against the house wall, into the edge of shade the overhanging balcony provided. Certainly he ought to water and stable his horse, but something, perhaps only his lassitude, seemed to hold him where he was.
A strange shimmer rose from the corner where the yellow sunlight spangled the white dust lying in the street. The doctor took off his glasses and began to clean them on his sweaty shirttail. Into the shimmer glided the figure of a tall woman with a water jar balanced on her head. Quickly he stuck his glasses back onto his nose. It was Nanon, much as she’d seemed when he’d first truly looked at her—her graceful gliding progress, the cage of a pet monkey steady on her head, when they’d chanced on each other in the Marché Clugny almost all of ten years ago. What had happened to that monkey? Destroyed in the first burning of Le Cap, most likely, or maybe it had managed to escape. It had always been a troublesome creature. But now, Nanon’s movement toward him was so abrupt that the water jar went flying from her, releasing a wave of bright water and painting a dark round stain on the dust.
There was the sweet shock of their contact, flesh on flesh, wrapped silkily on bone. Again the doctor’s mind went reeling through his visions. “You were with me,” he mumbled into the cloth of her bodice. “All through the worst of it you were with me still.”
Inside the house, the doctor and Nanon looked in for a moment on Gabriel and François where they slept. It was the hour of the afternoon siesta. Nanon invited him to rest, to bathe—Zabeth had retrieved the jar unbroken and gone to fetch more water. But the doctor wanted to see Paul, who had gone to Morne Calvaire. Together they walked in that direction, lightly swinging their linked hands.
The church on the hilltop where the doctor and Nanon had been married had lost its roof to Christophe’s conflagration. A stick-and-thatch shelter had since been built against one of the smoke-stained walls, and in its shade sat Claudine Arnaud, still as a snake in her rusty black dress. Moustique’s little boy Dieufait pressed into her hip and lightly stroked her hands.
“She did not go with the others to La Tortue?” said the doctor.
Nanon shook her head, smiling as she looked away. “Such parties of pleasure are not to her taste.”
It was always windy on the hilltop; the doctor reached to brush Nanon’s hair out of her face. He stumbled a little on the path, because he could not stop looking at her. Then he was almost knocked off his feet by Paul, who came charging out of the palm palisade of the Morne Calvaire lakou.
“Moustique has come, and told me you were here,” Paul blurted. “He says you were at all the battle at La Crête à Pierrot.”
The doctor held him at arm’s length by his shoulders. “So,” he said, teasing a little. “You didn’t want to visit La Tortue with Sophie and Robert?”
“Oh yes, but we waited for you, Maman and I. Maman said she knew you were going to come.”
The doctor tried to catch Nanon’s eye, but Paul was pulling him by the wrist into the enclosure of the lakou. Fontelle and Paulette and Marie-Noelle abandoned the laundry they had been peeling from the rocks to fold and came clustering around him. Even Maman Maig’ rolled her great bulk upright and smiled at him broadly, before she settled herself back down on her low stool.
Moustique was unpacking a number of squat, cloth-covered clay jars and arranging them around the rainbow-striped central post. The doctor slipped out of the cluster of women and walked in that direction. Among the jars lay a shard of mirror which for a long time he had carried in his own pocket—he was interested to see that it was still