Chapter Ten
“DOMINE, NON SUM DIGNUS,” Père Bonne-chance intoned, kneeling before the altar of his church—no more, actually, than a bench of board which supported two planks nailed together for a cross. The cross was wrongly proportioned, closer to equilateral than it ought to have been, like a Maltese cross. Père Bonne-chance was an extraordinarily poor carpenter, though there was no reason to include this defect in his act of contrition, he did not think…
“Seigneur, je n’suis pas digne,” he muttered, and then in a somewhat clearer voice, “I am addicted to rum, and concupiscence. Cigars too. I am slothful as a hog.” He thought for a moment. “And not much cleaner. I am nothing but a little fat man after all. Gluttonous and malodorous to boot, O Lord, I am not worthy…My will is weak. Each day I break my vows to the Church, O Lord, and daily I affirm my faith in You.”
He fingered the rosary which depended from his belt, and which he used less to remember prayers than to enumerate his failings. “Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us.”
He stood up and turned to face the congregation, although as usual the tiny church was empty. The walls, made of split palmiste, were bare too, except for a random ornamentation of dirt-dauber nests molded from the pale natural clay. Through the palmiste walls came long irregular slices of the outdoor sunlight. Above, mice scrambled in the palm thatch, and a frond detached, sailing wing-like to the bare earth floor. But for its single Christian symbol, this room was no different from the ajoupa where Père Bonne-chance lived, beside it.
It was the norm for him to have no other celebrants at his service. Sometimes the outlying planters would send a string of bossales for baptism, those who did not care to let them go as far as Abbé Osmond’s church in the town of Ouanaminthe. The white families on the three plantations nearest by might sometimes appear at Sunday’s Mass, though not on major feast days, when they like others would go to the town. He did not know what moved them to make their rare appearances, some private spiritual quavering he could not guess, and which they did not confess to him. They all despised him because he was not chaste, and he accepted their contempt without resentment, as his due. For the most part he ministered only to the slaves of their plantations, whose motives were considerably more clear to him; he knew that they sought repeated baptisms in much the same spirit that they replaced the macandals and ouangas strung around their necks, but he saw no great harm in indulging them.
He stepped over the fallen scrap of thatch and bent his head to pass through the door, flinching a little as the gay, bright sunlight struck into his face. When he had awakened this morning he had thought as he sometimes did that perhaps he would not drink at all, this day. The stress of this conception was such that he already craved a drink, though usually he did not take one before noon, and often not until evening. With the desire upon him, he broke into a sweat. But then his youngest child came running up, all naked, his tawny skin shining and sweet. He smiled and raised his hands and Père Bonne-chance picked him up and kissed his face. Set down, the child scampered happily away and the priest stood admiring how miraculously well his limbs were hung together and how easily he used them, without thought.
His own sweat had an unpleasant scent of anxiety and alcohol, as he had mentioned in his prayer. The priest loosened his ceinture, thinking that he had as well go for a swim, to cleanse his body at the very least, and perhaps distract his mind. The River Massacre ran just behind the church and his ajoupa.
At the point where he undressed, a few trees stood, enough to give him a measure of privacy, though most of the riverbank here at the French side of the elbow was cleared. He left his Dominican habit hanging on a low limb to air and waded out into the water, knee-deep. The water was quite cold, running clear from its mountain source. If he looked down he could see his hairy toes curling to grip the gravelly silt of the bottom, a little magnified and distorted by the water. The cold spread up his spine and pained him in his back teeth. He patted the surface of the water with the flats of his meaty hair-backed hands and looked up and down the river carefully for caymans, which were not unknown here, though the temperature this far up the Massacre did not really agree with them.
He walked waist-deep into the water and suddenly flung himself forward upon it, sending up a glistening wave as he submerged for an instant. Then he bobbed back up. He swam in a splayed crawling stroke at an angle against the current of the river. When he first struck the water the cold had made his vitals shrink but with the exercise he soon became fairly comfortable. He was very buoyant because of his fat although the shape of his stomach made it awkward for him to swim belly-down. To compensate, he had developed a powerful backstroke and now he resorted to this, swimming diagonally toward the middle of the river.
The sky above was a faultless blue, curving unlimited down into the cleared western bank. On the far side, the Spanish shore, it cut off at the treetops along the sharply rising mountain range. Along these peaks the sky was flocked with cloud. The verdure on those wrinkled slopes was unbroken, bearing no visible trace of any human passage. At the farthest distance the jungle green smoked into a slate-blue haze.
Père Bonne-chance stopped swimming and floated idly on his back. His legs dragged sideways in the current, and, peering around the mounded contour of his stomach, he could see his own compound, such as it was. The voices of his children came toward him thinly as they chased each other over the hard-packed earth between the small thatched squares of the church and the ajoupa. The boys wore only tattered trousers, ragged to the knee, the girls hemless cotton shifts, much the same garb as the slaves on the neighboring plantations, though they were free. At the corner of the ajoupa was tethered a dun cow and the woman—he could not call her wife—was balanced on a one-legged stool to milk. Fontelle. Her head was bound in a tall turban of multicolored scarves, funicular, like a beehive. The priest watched as she finished the task. Balancing the milk pail on her head, she unleashed the cow and sent her away to graze with a slap on her skinny hindquarters. Fontelle had aged, bearing the numerous children of Père Bonne-chance, but she still had her height and grace of movement. Her nose was exceedingly long and had two peculiar swerves along the length of it; she was snaggle-toothed, with a weak chin. He knew most men would find her ugly—let them think so.
He rolled onto his side to inspect the river surface. A way upstream from him something lifted briefly; he couldn’t make it out entirely in the water’s reflected glare, but it seemed about the size of a cayman’s eyes and snout. He swam a little nearer his home shore, watching. Whatever it was dipped up and down in a lifelike manner, but perhaps the movement was a little too regular. When it floated nearer he saw it was only a crook of a floating branch which had deceived him.
He rolled onto his back again and relaxed into the water. With his ears submerged the shouts and whistles of the children were cut off. He might even have dozed. But suddenly a flight of doves splintered in all directions across his tranquil sky, as if something had startled them. He swung himself to the vertical and trod water, turning his bullet head to and fro. A white man on horseback was riding up toward the compound from the direction of Ouanaminthe, abreast of a slave who rode a mule. A nègre chasseur, the priest thought he must be, since he carried a long-barreled fowling piece crossways over his saddle.
In the still air he could hear their voices plainly, though the riders were still several hundred yards off. The white man pointed to a tree. “Orion,” he cried, “Là, voila.” The priest watched the black take his aim. The several species of ramier in this area were so seldom hunted they were virtually tame. At the shot, two fell, and the rest of the covey rose in nervous flight and circled the tree and lit again. A pair of white goats which had been grazing near the trail picked up their heads and moved farther off.
Orion, the nègre chasseur, hopped down from the mule and ran to collect the fallen birds. One was not completely killed and he wrung its neck and scurried back to remount. The children, mean-while, had bunched up like a flock of sheep. They hid behind the church in a cluster, giggling and whispering and peering around the fraying palmiste corner of the building. The men passed them, riding up to the ajoupa. Fontelle came out and answered some question the white man put too low for the priest to overhear. Her turban switched back and forth like a rudder as she gestured with her head.
The two men rode toward the grove of trees where Père Bonne-chance had left his garments. He saw that infallibly they must reach it before he could, though their pace was leisurely. Still, he flopped forward and swam as briskly as he might—in his labored crawl, feeling that his backstroke would be unseemly before such an audience. When it was shallow enough for him to touch his foot, he stood up and began to wade out. The strangers had pulled their mounts up near the bank and were waiting.
Naked, Père Bonne-chance came out of the river, water streaming from the hair that covered him. He was pelted front and back like an ape or a small black bear. He smiled at the visitors. The black looked away, out of discretion. From the pommel of his saddle hung a string of birds, and a thin trickle of blood stained the mule’s forequarter.
“You are prolific,” Arnaud said, gazing frankly at the crook in Père Bonne-chance’s organ of generation, “for a priest.”
“Oh sir,” said Père Bonne-chance, smiling still more brightly at his guest. “You must have come a long way to pay me such a compliment.”
Arnaud’s plump lips formed a sort of heart-shaped smile. Slowly he turned his head to examine the priest’s old Dominican robe where it swung idly from its branch. Père Bonne-chance’s skin prickled, hairs lifting on their follicles. Arnaud looked knowing, as if he could somehow discern, seeing the priest shucked bare of his costume, that it was only a disguise for Père Bonne-chance, who had stayed in the colony unlawfully after the expulsion of the Jesuit order. Though in fairness one could hardly say that he was truly a Jesuit any longer, yet certainly he had never been a Dominican either. For an instant he was frozen. But there was no real penetration in Arnaud’s look, it was only the Creole aristocrat’s reflexive sneer. Besides he was not much the sort of gentleman to interest himself in sectarian differences among monks and priests.
“Not only for that,” Arnaud said, “dear Father. Not only for that. I’m told there is a passable ford somewhere in this vicinity?”
“At Ouanaminthe, do you mean?” Père Bonne-chance said, full of false malicious innocence, for he had seen very well that Arnaud had come from the direction of the town.
“Non, quand même,” Arnaud snapped. “Is there not another farther up the river?”
“Justement,” said Père Bonne-chance, unkindly smiling still. “Past that bend there,” he stretched his arm, “and then it’s not more than a mile, perhaps three-quarters. On the Spanish shore,” he said, “you’ll see a bare cleft rock, and on our bank a tree stump, acajou. You must head your horses strictly on a line between these marks, because the way is narrow and the current is strong.”
Arnaud nodded and laid a finger against the broad brim of his hat as a mocking salute. He scanned Père Bonne-chance ironically from head to foot once more and without thanks or any other word spurred his horse and trotted away up the riverbank. Orion pulled the mule around to follow.
Père Bonne-chance assumed once more his musty habit. The exhilaration of his swim had rather faded from him. Watching the horse’s tail switching at flies as Arnaud receded, he half-attentively apologized to God for needling the man about the ford. This had been deliberately unpleasant of him, since he knew Arnaud must be engaged in smuggling. If he had been interested in any sort of legitimate commerce he would much more conveniently have crossed the river at Ouanaminthe to the Spanish town of Da-jabón—like any other trader.
He returned to the ajoupa, where Fontelle had prepared for him hot cassava and a bowl of milk fresh foaming from the cow. After he had eaten he lit a thin cigar and went out into the yard to gather such of his children who could be found and give them a lesson in the writing of French. They sat upon the earth to scratch in the dust with sticks for styluses. The priest had no books suitable for this instruction, only some volumes in Latin and a few French novels whose content was wholly inappropriate, he recognized, even for such children as his. Indeed, now that his older daughters were semiliterate he kept the French books hidden. There were some old newspapers from Le Cap and from France which he had carefully saved to read and reread during these sessions, but by now their news was very cold.
The cigar at least was excellent, having come from the Spanish side. As Père Bonne-chance savored the smoke it came to him that Arnaud must be going after guns. There was no other commodity that would require his surreptitious route, not even slaves. Regardless of whatever proclamations might obtain, anything and everything else was freely traded between Ouanaminthe and Dajabón.
The idea brought him only a heaviness, however. When the children had wandered away from the lesson he stubbed his cigar out on the ground and went into the ajoupa to seek his pallet there. With a dim sense of satisfaction he realized that by diversion he’d managed to elude his wish to drink.
It was late by the time he awoke, as he could see by the deepening color of the light dropping through the ajoupa’s open doorway. He dipped water from the pail by the door and took a sip and splashed the rest of the gourd against his face to rouse himself. With the trickles drying on his throat he stood in the door and watched the light’s shade muting on the surface of the river. As they would each evening, the doves were calling loudly all around, as if the morning’s slaughter made no difference to them. Again the sound of hooves was somewhere on the trail.
He poured himself a thimbleful of rum and drank it and went out. It might have been Arnaud and his huntsman returning, and though their encounter had not been so pleasant for the priest to wish much to repeat it, he was curious. But strolling around the corner of the church he saw that it was a group of new riders coming up from Ouanaminthe. They were mulattoes all five of them, all with excellent horses and well dressed. Of the wealthy, educated classes. Père Bonne-chance did not know them; he did not think they were of this quarter, probably. One or two of them looked familiar, though, and he thought that he might have seen them previously. It was possible, even likely, that this was so, for many if not most of Ogé’s party had remained at large after the leaders were taken.
The warmth of the rum spread leaflike veins all through his chest, tendrils curving down into his stomach. He licked his lips and walked a little nearer the trail, wondering if he would hail the riders, or they him. The leader had a strangely freckled face that Père Bonne-chance felt certain he would have recalled if ever he had seen it before. His aspect was forbidding, and his eyes passed over the priest coldly and without a pause.
The same two goats were cropping grass beside the trail again, and Père Bonne-chance changed his course, as if all along he’d only been going to round them up. As if the passage of these riders were so wholly unremarkable that he had not even noticed them. They passed on.
He had not been much frightened by Ogé’s rebellion; really it had gone over too quickly for him to take alarm. In these parts the whole affair had been very smoothly managed, with only one white man killed and that by accident. As well, the mulattoes might have taken him to be in sympathy with their faction, since he lived openly with Fontelle. She was a quarteronnée and their children therefore were all officially sang-mêlés: that is, one sixty-fourth-part Negro. Père Bonne-chance had been sensible of the idea that Ogé was fighting for their rights.
But the unlucky little army had paid him no mind, as if he’d been a bête de cornes himself, grazing blindly by the trail. It was thus that he’d come to know that a few days before his capture Ogé had cached most of his arms somewhere up the river, where Arnaud and the other party had gone. The two journeys might well be connected; on the other hand perhaps they were not. Thinking these things, Père Bonne-chance continued to pursue the goats, which went their own way, ignoring him.