Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [404]
Bienvenu passed a hand across his face. “Is it true?” he said.
Riau turned to Guiaou, and raised a fingertip to trace the furrow of the old sword scar that slashed down from his temple across the flesh of his cheek. This was strange, for Riau and Guiaou had not touched one another with their hands since the time long ago when they had tried to kill one another over Merbillay. They were friends now. They claimed the same children. But they did not touch. Riau moved his finger carefully, as he might have traced a line of words over paper, and Guiaou felt blood spreading under his skin, along the edges of the scar.
“It’s true,” Riau said. He dropped his hand, inhaled once deeply, and left the room through the door Toussaint and Dessalines had used. After a moment, the other two men followed him.
At dusk, when Doctor Hébert returned to the Cigny house, he found Zabeth and Michau crouched in the foyer, scrubbing blood from the floor with hard-bristled brushes.
“What has happened?” he said, though by the seizure of his throat he thought he knew. Zabeth gave him a stricken look.
“Madamn Elise endispozé,” she said. Madame Elise has fainted.
The house felt cold, though it was not. “Where is she?” he said.
“Maman Maig’ has taken her.” Zabeth lowered her head over her scrub brush.
He hurried through the darkening streets. Some people were already carrying torches, and that unnerved the doctor slightly, much as he told himself the town was secure. What was to stop them setting it afire again? Maybe it had never really stopped burning.
He found Isabelle wringing her hands on the steps of the shell of the church atop the hill. Claudine stood beside the three wooden crosses, her brittle hair loosed in the wind and streaming out behind her.
The doctor stopped wordless before Isabelle. “I can’t go down there,” she said, twisting her head toward the trail that wrapped around the church. “It frightens me—I can’t.”
“It’s all right,” the doctor said. “I am here. You must go home.”
He went to Claudine and touched her elbow. “Please take her to her house,” he said. Claudine placed his hand between both of hers. For a moment he felt the stub of her missing finger pressing a vein on the back of his hand. She nodded to him, without speaking.
The way down from the church to the lakou was a goat path, and as he hurried through the dark the doctor lost footing on the shale and slid the remaining distance on the seat of his pants. Moustique appeared at his side to help him up. Someone shifted one of the palm panels to admit them to the hûnfor.
Four candles burned around the central post with its rainbow twining. The candles made a yellow orb within the bluer starlight that rained down from the sky. In the shadow behind it, some twenty feet away, was a low, squat cross with short, heavy arms. It must have always been there, the doctor supposed, but he did not remember it. It was not the cross of Christ, of that much he was certain. As he turned from it, he felt something of the fear that Isabelle had mentioned.
At the opposite end of the line the cross and central post defined, more candles had been lit around an open doorway. Hesitantly the doctor approached. The cold pressure of that dark cross lay on the back of his neck. Moustique dropped a pace behind him. Within the shelter, his sister lay on a bed of freshly cut green boughs, her eyes closed, and still as death. The doctor halted a few feet from the threshold. His breath stopped. It did not appear to him that Elise was breathing either. She was as frostily pale as the sheet that covered her.
“Li pako mouri.” The doctor turned his head toward the voice of Maman Maig’ at his left. She is not dead yet. The massive figure of the mambo was barely distinguishable from the darkness in which she stood. He wanted to think it was all her doing, but he knew she had only done what Elise asked.
“I have the knowledge from slavery time,” Maman Maig’ said, as if responding to his thought. “In that time, many children were sent back, beneath the waters, before their eyes could open