Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [379]
He bowed to the women, then turned to the doctor, holding out his hand. The doctor stared at it till it wilted.
“Your apology has been accepted,” he said to Paltre. “You may go.”
When Paltre’s hand dropped, it settled on his sword hilt. His Adam’s apple pumped in his throat. For a moment the doctor willed him to draw. But Cyprien and Daspir closed in on either side of Paltre and brushed his hand free of his weapon.
“Come on,” said Cyprien. “It’s over.”
Paltre turned and walked away between his two companions. Guizot lingered for a moment, looking at the doctor, who finally acknowledged him with a nod and a half-smile. He understood that Guizot must have put some effort into this reconciliation, and maybe it was better to end it so.
Nanon now stood alone on the balcony, her hair stringing loose from her chignon and blowing across her face in the dampening wind. Perhaps Paul had sensed something and gone to fetch her, the doctor thought. He went indoors and climbed to join her. The knot of his anger had been sundered, but he was not sure what it left him to say. She faced him, her brown eyes warm and wild. The wind blew her loose gown tight against her: a simple, tea-colored dress with the round collar ornamented with an embroidered trumpet vine of her own sewing. A spatter of raindrops blew into her face, and the doctor felt the cold dots on his bald spot.
“After all that has been between us,” she told him, “no thought and no word and no opinion matters but yours and mine.”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “I suppose that was what Madame Fortier meant to tell me, in her way.”
“Madame Fortier? I had heard she had come to town.”
“I called on her this afternoon—Paul took me there. She sends her greetings to you.” The doctor paused, thinking what he had said was true enough to the spirit of their encounter, though Madame Fortier had not been so explicit. Nanon moved a little nearer to him, trailing one hand along the iron railing of the balcony. He looked down. “It seems that she and every one I’ve spoken to since yesterday has wanted to dissuade me—and I suppose it’s better so.”
“Of course it is better,” Nanon said. She looked down at the point on the street where the four captains had made their appearance. “You ought to have taken his hand,” she said. “He will resent it that you did not.”
With that she raised her eyes to his. She was so near that he could feel her warmth.
“I don’t know, perhaps I should have,” the doctor said. “But before God and before all the world, I will take yours.”
36
We did not know what spirit it was that bore the doctor to the ground that night at Habitation Arnaud. The spirit strung its power from beneath the waters to the top of the sky, so that he hung like a fish on a line, but after that it did no other action, spoke no word. Moustique was there, who was both hûngan and prêt savann, and Moustique might have coaxed the lwa to speak its name through the doctor’s mouth, but he did not. I, Riau, I saw the spirit split the doctor’s head as a sprout divides the two halves of a seed, and from his shoulders bloomed a black sunflower, but nothing more followed. As he was blanc, maybe the doctor did not have the strength to carry one of the great loa on his head. So his legs collapsed beneath him, and the other blancs carried him away into Arnaud’s grand’case, and his ti bon ange returned to him in sleep, to the place in his head where the spirit had driven it out.
When the doctor awoke he was himself again, but I, Riau, was gone. I did not need to be with those blancs any more, and so I was going back to Toussaint, though not by the straightest road. I did not know just where I was going, and yet the way before me was clear.
I rode through the forest of Bois Caïman, where Boukman had called down all the lwa a dozen years before to help us drive the blancs out of our country. There were not many people there this time of year, but every space between the old trees hummed with spirits. A blanc might move through air all full of spirits and