Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [375]
“I will see to it.” Leclerc drew out his watch and snapped it open. “Doctor Hébert, you give us hope. I will call on you soon again, but for the moment, please excuse me.”
The doctor bowed, and Leclerc withdrew. He climbed into the coach with Guizot and drove out through the gate behind the graveyard cart.
For the remainder of the morning the doctor surveyed arrangements at the hospital. It seemed to him that the nurses were doing almost everything that could be done—though there were too few of them; too many women had been frightened away by the yellow fever. He would need to recruit more, and he would need to organize an herb gathering, and the supply of fresh water and ordinary grains for those with dysentery also appeared to be insufficient.
The women had even saved his hammock for him; it had been rolled up and stored. At midday he strung it in the accustomed place, and dozed through the hottest hour of the afternoon. When he awoke, he left the hospital and strolled down toward the waterfront, zigzagging block by block, for he was in no special hurry to return to the Cigny house. At the lower gate of the Morne Calvaire lakou, he happened upon Paul, who shouted with pleasure and ran to greet him. The boy bumped his shoulder against the doctor’s hip, and stuck close to him as they moved a little awkwardly along the street toward the Batterie Circulaire.
“Papa,” Paul said. “I wrote you the letters. All the time you were away I wrote the letters.”
“Do you have them still?” said the doctor.
“No,” said Paul. “We could not send them, so I sent them up in smoke.” He pulled away from the doctor’s side and looked up at the hill of Morne Calvaire.
“Well,” said the doctor. “Maybe we were near in spirit then.”
Paul turned toward him, smiling, knocked again into his hip. The doctor draped a hand over his shoulder.
“Papa!” Paul said. “Do you remember Madame Fortier? She is a grande dame de couleur—she is very tall?”
“I remember her,” said the doctor, with a vague sense of foreboding. “I am surprised that you do.”
“But she is here now, at Le Cap—I saw her only a few days ago,” Paul said.
It was unusual for him to be so talkative, the doctor thought. Ever since that time he had spent abandoned in these streets so long ago, he had been, though apparently calm and contented enough, quiet and a little withdrawn.
“She said she would come to visit Mami,” Paul continued. “But she has not come, or I did not see her—Papa, can we go to her house? It is in the Rue Vaudreuil.”
“Now?” said the doctor. “What do you want to go there for?” He knew very well where the house must be and had no desire at all to visit it. “And it is far—too far to walk.”
Paul only brightened. “M’ap chaché bourik pou nou!” He ran back toward the lower gate of Morne Calvaire. I will look for donkeys for us.
The doctor looked after him, feeling somewhat dour—his sister would have reproved the boy for blurting out Creole instead of good French, and Paul was running a little wild. Probably he ought to be in school, but then the schools had all been burned, their masters scattered. Now he came bursting back out of that gate, leading two donkeys with their woven straw saddles. A little girl in a red dress glared after him, fists to her hips.
“Wait,” said the doctor. “Did you just take those donkeys from her?” But the girl had disappeared into the gateway, and Maman Maig’ stood where she had been, smiling and waving them on their way.
The Rue Vaudreuil was some considerable distance, but it was pleasant to ride along the harborfront. At the end of the long quai, they swung up into the town and circled out around the hum of the market at the Place Clugny. The house they were looking for ought to have been in the next block, but the doctor could scarcely recognize the work in progress that stood in its place—the original had been all built of wood, and so the fire must have razed it. Before it had been rather garishly painted—a bawdy place, run by Choufleur as a bordello