Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [401]
Daspir followed Zabeth into the street. Someone, probably Claudine, knocked the door shut behind them as soon as they were through it. The cart had already groaned away, and he and Zabeth stood staring at each other round-eyed on the vacated street, but still imprinted on his vision was the picture of Elise on the floor with the blood spreading so rapidly around her on the floor. The blood had seemed to come from nowhere. When blood ran out of wounded men like that, they died.
“What was it?” Daspir said. “What was it she was singing?”
Zabeth, her eyes still fastened on his face, half-whispered an echo of the tune.
Talk about it, talk about it
Plenty-girls family will talk about it
Plenty-girls threw off a seven-month baby
Plenty-girls threw off a seven-month baby
Children are wealth, O, talk about it. . . .
Zabeth clapped her hands over her mouth and stared at him for one second more. Then she dropped her hands, picked up her skirts, and ran as fast as she could in the direction of Morne Calvaire.
38
Since dawn Guiaou had been mounted, with most of the others of the honor guard, and waiting for the order to ride. The night before, word had passed that Toussaint meant to strike Grande Rivière, to recapture the arms depot that Christophe had just surrendered to the French. Guiaou had stayed up late into the night, making cartridges and polishing all the metal parts of his musket, then slept for five hours, and risen with the morning mist. All the guardsmen were sitting their horses, which were restive, ready to move, but Toussaint was nowhere to be seen and no one else appeared to lead them anywhere. At sunrise, a couple of dispatch riders came clattering in on the road from Dondon. The guardsmen parted to let them through, and they rode on toward the center of town.
After some more time had passed without anything happening, Guiaou dismounted. Many of the other guardsmen had already done the same. Magny and Monpoint and Riau had gone down into the town with the dispatch riders, and no commanders were with them now, and no one knew what was going to happen. Guerrier paced up and down between the horses. Guiaou wished he would stop walking. At last, when the sun had grown warmer, Guerrier stretched out in the shade of the cliff above the road and spread his mouchwa over his eyes.
Guiaou had eaten little the night before, and nothing at all that morning. His stomach was drawn tight for fighting, but now it all began to loosen. He had lost the point of his concentration, and began to feel tired and uncertain. He sat down cross-legged and began to sharpen his coutelaswith a small, hard stone he carried in his cartridge bag, even though the blade was already sharp enough to shave the little hairs from his leg.
The sun had just begun to spread into Guerrier’s patch of shade when Riau came with a new order. About half the guards were dismissed for the day. The rest would ride with Toussaint, but to Marchand instead of Grande Rivière. What their reason for going there was, Riau did not tell, but it looked like they would not be fighting the blancs that day. Guiaou relaxed on the back of his horse, let his heels hang, and after a little while on the road he let himself doze. During his few hours of sleep last night his head had been charged with pictures of the fighting he was waiting for today. Now he was tired, and his head drained.
They went by the back ways through the mountains, hiding themselves from the open ground of the rizières above Ester. By the time they rode into Marchand, the shadows had grown long. Madame Dessalines stood in the doorway of her house and smiled at Toussaint and bent her legs inside her skirts as he got down from his horse. Toussaint ordered most of the guard to go and water and rest their horses by the well in the square, but he kept Riau and Guiaou and Guerrier with him, along with Monpoint and Placide Louverture. Madame Dessalines led them all into the house together.
Toussaint and Monpoint