Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [420]
As the afternoon sun declined behind the wall above the ravine, the doctor watched Madame Fortier watch Nanon, who crouched, beside the pallet of Captain Paltre, spooning a clear broth between his slack jaws. The other three captains leaned against the wall, also observing this procedure, scraping their shoulders on the rough-laid brick as they shifted their feet, but Madame Fortier did not spare them so much as an ironic glance. In recent days she had appointed herself in charge of the whole crew of nurses here, who accepted her authority without a murmur. What moved her the doctor couldn’t have said, though he thought it could not be any special affection for the invading French soldiers.
Paltre choked and turned his head to one side, gagging, projecting a stream of black, foul-smelling vomit onto the ground beside his pallet. At the snap of Madame Fortier’s fingers another of the nurses came forward to clean the vile stuff up. As Paltre subsided, weak and gasping, Madame Fortier scraped a little loose dirt over the residue of the vomit with the side of her shoe.
Paltre’s eyes drifted shut. Nanon laid a hand on his forehead, turning an ear toward the ragged sound of his breathing. Then she withdrew her hand and stood up, smoothing her skirts and coolly returning the gaze of the three captains by the wall. When they had dropped their eyes, she turned from them and walked, with the slightest swing in her step, down the rows of other ailing men toward the hospital gate, where Maillart and General Pamphile de Lacroix were just arriving.
When she had gone, the three captains detached themselves from the wall and approached, but only Cyprien knelt beside Paltre’s pallet, and even he lacked the courage to touch him. Whatever Cyprien might have murmured was thoroughly muffled by the scented handkerchief with which he shielded his nose and mouth. Paltre did not respond to anything he said, and presently Cyprien abandoned his effort and stood up. On his pallet, Paltre stirred and moaned in his delirium. With a horsetail whisk she held in her hand, Madame Fortier brushed off a fly that had settled on his nostrils.
“Will he recover?” Guizot said, looking at the doctor with his usual expression of devotion. He’d put this question day after day, since Paltre had first been stricken.
“I can’t be certain,” said the doctor, and then, when he saw that all three of the captains still seemed to be searching his face, “I have recovered from this disease myself, and have sometimes seen others survive it, so at least I can say that recovery is possible.”
The captains nodded, mumbled, shuffled their feet, and turned away. A faint breeze stirred the leaves of the tall palms as they passed under them. The wall above the ravine had stretched its shadow across the first row of the moribund below it. The captains exchanged brief courtesies with Maillart and Pamphile de Lacroix, who stood with Nanon just within the gate. Madame Fortier watched, with her hand on her hip, until they’d moved outside beyond the gateposts. With a sniff and a shrug she moved along the rows of the sick and wounded, in the opposite direction from the doctor, who was going down to greet the newcomers.
“Tell me, how do you get on?” said General Lacroix.
“Neither well nor far,” said the doctor, accepting the hand Lacroix had offered. “It’s only the disease that progresses here.”
“Truly,” said Lacroix. “I have recommended to the Captain-General that our new arrivals be sent to the eastern mountains, where all this dangerous miasma is swept away by the wind, until they are better acclimated to this place. But as you see, our situation is such that they must all be hurled into the abyss at the moment they first debark, and perish before they can render any service.”
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