Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [84]
A smell of hot tar hung over the square. A sexton was sweeping the steps of the church, and opposite the doors from where he worked sat a charcoal burner, a small gnarled man, with his knees drawn up to his heavily underslung jaw. She passed him and went into the church, pausing just over the threshold for her eyes to adjust to the dim. In the motionless air of the interior, the scent of candle wax and stale incense mingled with the tar smell from outside. After a moment she sat down on a bench so far to the rear that she could barely make out the glimmer of the cross on the altar. Lowering her head, she began mechanically to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Just why she had come here she did not know. An impulse, to walk in the town before leaving it, concealed in her man’s dress. She had a desire to pray for deliverance, but she could not yet name or know the thing from which she needed to be delivered, and because she had no habit of prayer the words were dry and lifeless on her tongue.
A paper scuffed onto the bench beside her, folded and sealed with a glob of red wax. Automatically she whisked it into the belly of her shirt. As she touched the paper, the image of the little charcoal burner flashed behind her eyes. Impossible. He had been soot-stained all over his clothes and headcloth and his hands and face, but she had seen no sack of charcoal near him. She stood up, securing the letter with a hand pressed to her waistband. He was there on the bench behind her, but she did not venture to look at him directly. The sexton had shuffled back into the church and was puttering in the area of the font.
“W pa konnen’m. Pasé!” She turned her head just enough to glimpse the whites of his eyes beneath the soot-stained cloth. You don’t know me. Pass on!
In a moment she was standing on the steps outside the church. At the sound of his voice she had felt somewhat more sure. They had spoken Creole to each other that one time, in urgent sibilant whispers. The slight roughness of his tone was like cat fur. Some white women who courted him were seeking preferment, but for Elise it had been different. Tocquet had absented himself to the North American Republic for God only knew how long, and she had wanted some great powerful secret for herself. In fact even Isabelle, who usually could divine the little Elise did not tell her, knew nothing of this interlude.
And must she really go this day? The smell of tar was stronger now, all over the Place d’Armes. On arriving she had not noticed the little group of men at the opposite corner of the square, clustered around an iron cauldron from which the tar smoke rose. Two of them held unlit lances à feu upright before them, like standards.
“W’alé!” The grating whisper came from a pace behind her. As if he’d read the question from her mind. “You are going. Now. Before the fire.”
Elise went stumbling, as if the voice had shoved her. Or maybe it was the boot heels, still slightly unfamiliar to her feet. She hurried, not once looking back. At the next corner from the Place d’Armes she found in her pathway a worn-out, broken broom with its two pieces crossed. The débris in the interstices seemed arranged with some calculation; among the ordinary litter she picked out a twist of tobacco, an elaborately knotted string, a small, faceless doll sewn in black cloth, and a whole hen’s egg . . . Some nonsense of African superstition. She ought to feel free to walk right over it, to kick it