Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [440]
“Come on,” he said and turned his horse. A long way south down the road, below Morne Saint Juste, bloomed a cloud of dust that concealed other riders.
“Koté n’alé?” César said. Where are we going? But he didn’t seem surprised or troubled when Placide did not answer.
They held a trot going up the hill down which they had just come. A file of market women passed them, going down to Gonaives, and one of them looked up, smiling, and returned her head to the way before her. Placide felt how the eggshell closed around him. It still possessed the harmony he’d felt that morning, but it was no longer working in his favor. When the ground leveled they rode in a smooth canter toward the crossroads of Ennery. The red mouchwa têt, folded in Placide’s shirt pocket, felt warm over his heart, and he thought of stopping to tie it on his head, but then thought better of that, or worse.
A strange silence covered the mango sellers at the Ennery kalfou, though the marchandes had been jovial when they passed that way an hour before. A French cavalry squadron was galloping down the road ahead, and now foot soldiers swarmed up from the river, overrunning the women with their baskets full of mangoes. Placide wheeled, to see that the other squadron, the one they’d seen below Morne Saint Juste, was coming up to cut off that retreat.
César produced an enormous dragoon pistol, but Placide checked him with a hand on his arm.
“Don’t,” he said. “There’s no hope in it.” And César seemed to accept what he had said. Mutely he shifted his hand from the grip to the barrel, ready to give up the gun to the approaching blancs. Placide supposed he would do the same with his own weapons.
The moment was whole, though inauspicious. We’ll see each other, Toussaint had said, if God wills. But apparently God willed otherwise.
A couple of middle-sized boys trotted alongside the doctor’s mule as he rode up the drive of Habitation Georges, smiling appreciatively at the butchered goat. One of them reached out shyly to touch a dangling hoof. It would be agreeable, the doctor thought, to cut off a shoulder for their mothers’ cookpots. But if he started on that course he wouldn’t have a scrap of meat to offer back at Thibodet.
He dismounted a good distance from the others’ horses and pegged the mule on a long tether so it could graze. The goat was still strapped behind the saddle and the rifle tilted crazily before it. In the thickening dusk he could just make out the shadowy figures of Maillart’s men as they spread along the pathways that spiraled in back of the house and into the fields, encountering others of Brunet’s corps, and also some of Toussaint’s guards, he now realized. It was peculiarly quiet, the air damp and heavy, as before rain. Though he could see the direction of movement of the clouds in the dark, the stars above him were closing off one by one. On an impulse he checked the pistols on his belt, and looked back once to where his mule grazed calmly, secure on its tether.
As he turned forward, he recognized the group beneath the hedge: his friends, Maillart and Guiaou and Riau, with Daspir and Guizot. His vision rushed out from him to the distant point where these men stood, as it had done that afternoon when he picked the goat off the crag. Though he had never known why this gift was his, to see a target at any distance was the same as touching it with a bullet from his gun.
When he reached the little group below the hedge,