Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [430]
He barely noticed the smell any more, but once the bodies had been stacked and covered with a square of canvas, he was relieved to wash his hands in scalding water from the kettle under the palm. Madame Fortier passed him the towel she’d used to dry her own. She meant to stay a little longer, till her husband came to fetch her with their wagon.
“You know,” the doctor said, “sometimes I wonder why you take such pains to nurse these men.” He hung the towel over a branch near the fire. “It cannot very well be for love.”
Madame Fortier smiled at him from her height. “Have you put that question to your wife?”
“No,” the doctor admitted. He rubbed his chin and looked down at her feet.
“BonDyé desires us to forgive our enemies,” Madame Fortier said. “It may well be that Nanon has the grace to do it.”
“But not you.” The doctor raised his eyes to her again.
“Oh no. Not me.” Madame Fortier held out her strong, square hand and the doctor clasped it.
“Nanon has a greater heart than mine,” she said. “You are fortunate, blanc, to have found a place there.”
She kept her grip on his hand as she spoke, and the doctor reflected that tonight the appellation blanc on her tongue had lost the hostile edge it usually had and seemed, indeed, almost affectionate.
“I would not tell it to Nanon,” she said, letting his hand drop at last. “But I’ll tell you: it does content me to watch them die, when I know I have done all I could to save them.”
40
Morning brought a rainbow up from the sun-spangled ravine east of grand’case of Descahaux. Placide, who had slept but poorly, looked on the colored band with pleasure. The ribbon ascended from the mist of the stream at the bottom of the gorge and, after a curve no greater than that of a saber’s edge, disappeared into a cloud above. It seemed to give the day some unexpected promise.
His mother raised the coffeepot, but Placide shook his head. Isaac was oblivious as she refilled his cup, his nose sunk in a leather-bound volume of Ovid. Since their return to Ennery, Isaac had buried himself in the studies that had occupied their time at the Collège de la Marche, preferring the pages of whatever book to anything in his actual surroundings. Only the day before, he had returned from a mission to Le Cap bearing a letter from Leclerc to Toussaint, but he had little to say about that expedition—no more than a monosyllabic grunt. This morning he did not even notice Saint-Jean, though the boy sat on the edge of his chair, waiting for Isaac to look up.
Placide got to his feet and kissed his mother’s cheek. He rubbed the head of his youngest brother and went from the gallery to find his horse. When he had mounted, he touched his thumb to the mouchwa têt he now kept folded in his shirt pocket, then turned his horse in the direction of Sancey, where crews were clearing the rubble of the buildings the French had burned.
Above, the rainbow had begun to fade and dissipate, its color dissolving into the vacant blue of the sky, and in spite of the bright sunshine Placide felt his mood begin to sink. There was a chattering in his head he could not seem to stop, a perpetual inner argument that would not let him sleep. The chattering cycled through a thousand questions: Where would new tiles be found to roof the Sancey grand’case? Why had his father given in to the French? And why had his generals seemed to betray him? Who would transport brown sugar to the port at Gonaives? And when would the struggle be rejoined? All in a random jumble of small issues with great ones. Why had so many French soldiers recently been sent to their vicinity, like a plague of grasshoppers devouring everything in the canton of Ennery?
The sunlight spilled on two men hacking at a hedgerow, just at the bend of the road ahead. Two ordinary laborers, they appeared to be, but one of them turned up a face that shone brilliantly through its maze of terrible scars, and saluted Placide with a coutelas