Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [414]
With that matter decided, Dieufait skipped out of the door of Elise’s chamber, singing a snatch of song as he capered.
Palé O, Palé O
La fanmi Asefi a palé O
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa . . .
A couple of the other children scampered around him, taking up the song, until the low rumble of Maman Maig’ ’s voice drove them out of the enclosure. Elise heard their voices spreading and fading over the steeper slopes above the lakou.
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa
Pitit se byen O, palé O...
Dieufait did not mean to wound her; this she knew. The children scarcely knew the meaning of the words they sang. He had not even meant to call her heartless. It was only a Creole expression for exhaustion, which was all she felt. A light fever had come over her, though she thought it had little to do with her bleeding or the child she had thrown off. It was only a new visit from some old fever which had found its way to her again, now she was weak. The fever put her pain at a distance. It jumbled her memory and confused her waking with her sleep. She didn’t know how long it had been since Maman Maig’ had made the second effort between her legs with her long wooden spoon. She didn’t know how much blood had poured out of the cavern the spoon had opened in her body.
But now a shadow blocked the doorway and Paulette came and knelt beside her and with her fingertips began to massage the area between her navel and her fente. Fontelle stood behind her, looking on.
“You must try it yourself,” Fontelle said. “This rubbing is the only thing to close the hole the blood comes from.”
But Elise had no heart for that effort either. She only submitted to the aching pressure of Paulette’s fingers, and thanked her weakly when she had gone. Almost hourly, one of the women came to her with their hands, Paulette or Fontelle or Marie-Noelle or Nanon, and sometimes Maman Maig’, though most often Maman Maig’ only stood by to advise and instruct the others.
Paulette had let the white drape fall over the doorway when she left, to shield Elise from the lowering afternoon sun. She had raised Elise’s feet, and Elise felt her head begin to swell, with the fever’s rising. There was some unusual noise in the town below—regular volleys of gunfire, and cannons from the direction of the harbor, but it did not much interest or worry her, though it did disturb her sleep. In half-delirium she seemed to struggle through a viscous fluid, a ghostly underwater world where everything was floating and the seaweed-tendriled shapes near her were somehow presences. One of those fetal forms abruptly rolled and raised its head from the blood in which it had been drowned and opened a hole in its skull to grin at her.
She woke with a terrible start, but the scream that she’d heard was not her own. No sound in her chamber but the sick, quick beating of her heart. The white drape had been raised from her doorway and she could see out past the striped central post to the shadow of the squat low cross beyond it. It was full dark now; she saw by starlight and by the light of candles waxed to small stones here and there. Someone was drumming, but she could not see the drums. The figure of Claudine Arnaud stood by the center post: fixed, rigid, shuddering. It was not Claudine herself who had screamed, Elise understood. The scream had only come through her.
Then Claudine’s body collapsed, as though the tendons that strung her limbs had melted, and Maman Maig’ appeared to catch her and cradle her in the vast cushion of her body, till whatever it was that occupied Claudine shook itself free of the mambo and rose. Moustique came toward her, cautiously, not quite cringingly.
“Maîtresse Erzulie!” he whispered as he offered his gifts: a comb, a round hand mirror, bright beads, and a small bottle of perfume. But Claudine’s hands dashed the offerings to the ground. The perfume bottle spilled into the dirt, releasing a weak musk. Claudine—it was not Claudine—seized up the mirror and