Chapter Fourteen
ARNAUD RODE UP THE RIVER VALLEY from the ford, followed by his nègre chasseur Orion. The trail he’d been told of did exist but was hard to follow in its twistings along the mountain escarpments, going up and farther up the gorge. Below, out of his sight, he could hear the noise of some tributary stream, rushing to join the Massacre. They went slowly, their mounts picking their way, Arnaud’s horse less easily than the mule ridden by his slave, though oftentimes both men had to dismount to lead them. Twice they found their way barred by obstructions they must clear: a slide of muddy rock and a fallen tree trunk half rotted over the trail. Arnaud had no choice but to put his own hand to the work and at those moments he wished he had brought more niggers along to help, although in other ways they would have hindered his journey.
A cloud brooded over the mountaintop above and ahead of them, and the jungle grew denser and damper, edging its way onto the trail. As the sun passed its zenith Arnaud began to grow uneasy. There was no sign of the men he expected to meet and he dearly wished to complete his return from the mountains before night. Across the gorge from where they made their way was the vestige of a clearing with banana suckers sprouting from what might have been terraces cut into the nearly sheer slope. As if someone had tried to carve a dwelling place and since abandoned it. It put Arnaud in mind of the maroon bands who very likely traveled these hills. He shook his head dourly and pressed on, following Orion, who had now taken the lead. The black stopped short and wrinkled his nose.
“K’eské sé?” Arnaud said.
“Fimé, lah?.” Orion swept a hand widely around the area and surveyed the gorge with a slow rotation of his head. Arnaud imitated the movement, hoping to catch a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye. He saw nothing, but a ghostly odor seemed to waft his way, not smoke so much as a surreal unlikely smell of roasting meat. He and Orion exchanged a shrug and continued. Some fifty yards farther on the trail Orion stopped again and stared into the thickness of the jungle.
“Là, là,” he muttered.
Still Arnaud could not see anything at first. Then at last his eye discerned another clearing within the thick bush above them and at its edge three figures waiting, posed almost as still as the trees, two blacks and what he took to be a Spaniard dressed in the kilt and boots of a boucanier of half a century gone, his face shaded out of view by the wide brim of his hat. There seemed nowhere on earth this party might have come from but there they were.
“De donde viene?” Arnaud called out half believingly.
“Donde va?”
The Spaniard’s voice came from nowhere, or out of the whole jungle all around. Arnaud left Orion holding the horses on the trail and began to climb the slope dividing them. So high on the mountain the jungle was always very wet and his footing was so uncertain in the mud he had to haul himself up by clutching at the trunks of trees. The meat smell blew in his face again. When he reached the others he saw that they had spitted a shoulder of wild pig and were roasting it over a muddy pit. The Spaniard crouched at the fire’s edge companionably with the two blacks, who were pulling off strips of the loosening meat as it cooked and eating it with their fingers.
“Ah, Michel,” the Spaniard said, standing again as Arnaud came level with him. “I didn’t know it would be you.” He took off his hat, and with a start Arnaud recognized Xavier Tocquet, his long mass of hair tied back with a greasy bit of black ribbon, his chin obscured by a short pointed Spaniard’s beard he’d grown.
“Nor I you,” Arnaud said, trying to conceal his breathlessness. In climbing the grade he’d broken into a clammy sweat, though it was quite cool in the jungle shade.
“Have you yet dined?” Tocquet inquired.
Arnaud looked distastefully at shreds of meat and roasted plantains still in their skins, spread on a glossy banana leaf. It was not the plainness of the provender which displeased him so much as the casual way Tocquet partook of it alongside the blacks.
“Merci, mais non,” he said. “I haven’t time.”
“Of course.” Tocquet’s deep-set eyes were glittering; perhaps his beard concealed a smile. He was a head taller than Arnaud, big-boned but lean in his loose clothing. His hands were huge; he raised one and waved it farther on. “Allez, regardez,” he said.
Arnaud climbed a little higher. From the far side of the fire pit he could see the clearing better: another abandoned cultivation, with the plantains running wild. Here six pack mules in a train were foraging on the jungle floor. Arnaud turned back the canvas from the back of one; beneath, the blunt muskets were bundled like firewood. He went on examining load after load, roughly calculating as he went along; Maltrot had let him know that payment had already been made through some other channel, but still he thought it best to check. His habit. As he went from mule to mule he looked all around the jungle and the borders of the clearing but there was no track or any other sign to show how the pack train might have reached this place.
“Satisfactory?” Tocquet called to him, from where he hunkered over the firepit.
“Ouais, bien s?r,” Arnaud said. He walked back to the lead mule and slipped a finger through its halter. All the mules were harnessed in a line and the whole string came behind him docilely, stopping when he stopped and nosing again at the jungle floor.
“You’re welcome to eat,” Tocquet said. “Call your man up if you like.” The two blacks had stopped eating; they sat back on their haunches and watched Arnaud with a quiet animal concentration. Above, invisibly, a cloud drifted over the forest ceiling and the space where they gathered grew darker.
“I want to be off the mountain before night,” Arnaud said. One of the blacks relaxed himself to lift a fresh whole pepper pod from the banana leaf and begin eating it.
“You’ve become altogether a Spaniard, Xavier?” Arnaud said. On the plain or in the coast towns he would not have addressed Tocquet by his first name, but it was difficult to muster any formality now.
“What does it matter here?” Tocquet tossed his head back. His neck swelled against the mass of his hair. Arnaud saw the uneven curls of beard sparse on his throat.
“This place was here before our nations,” Tocquet said. “I’ll trade you for your horse.” He jerked his head at three saddled mules which were tethered to thorny saplings at a brief distance from the fire pit. Arnaud stared at them for a moment and then burst out laughing.
“It’s harder going down than up,” Tocquet said.
“Vous êtes gentil,” Arnaud said. He peered down toward the trail. Orion, holding the horse and mule, had pressed himself partly into the trees for shelter from the light spatter of rain that was now tapping down on the leaves overhead. “I think not, however…”
“As it pleases you,” Tocquet said, gazing neutrally at the fat dripping onto the coals from the spitted shank, whose white bone glistened through tears in the flesh.
Arnaud tugged on the lead mule’s halter, meaning to guide the pack train down the steep slope to the trail. He had not gone more than twenty paces before his feet shot from under him in the mud and leaf mold. An arm crooked over a branch stopped him from falling altogether and saved a portion of his dignity. Tocquet, expressionless, snapped his fingers, and the two blacks rose from their meal and completed the task of guiding the pack train down. Arnaud heard Orion speak to them and heard that they answered, but he could not make out if they were speaking Creole or some African tongue; it irked him not to understand what they said.
His boots were clubs of mud, and when he slipped he’d strained a muscle, his legs splaying in opposite directions. He used the branch to straighten himself and took his weight shyly on both legs.
“Go with God, Michel!” Tocquet had risen to bid him good-bye, his huge hands paddling before him like flounder. “à la rencontre…” Arnaud smiled at him speechlessly over his shoulder. With care he made his way back to the trail.
At first he took the lead on the way down, while Orion brought up the rear of the pack train. The cloud that had been raining on them detached itself from the mass that clung to the mountain peak, drifted away and dissipated. The sun began to redden, westering over the hills. Making the best haste he could, Arnaud thought of Xavier Tocquet, the times they’d ridden together after runaways in the maréchaussée. When the going grew too rough for horses, Tocquet would always shed his boots and go up with mulattoes and the black slave-catchers, quick as a land crab over the rocks. On those occasions Arnaud had sneered at him, along with other whites who remained with their mounts. Now he wondered, if Orion had not seen them, if Tocquet would have let them pass and climb the mountain endlessly…It had been more than strange to hear Tocquet mention the name of God.
More sure-footed, the lead mule kept nosing into the hindquarters of Arnaud’s horse. Yet he was too stubborn to dismount, until at last the horse’s footing failed it on the muddy shale and it fell spraddled across the ledge, dumping Arnaud into the bush. He picked himself up, wiped a hand at the slick of mud on his shirt sleeve. The horse lay with its neck stretched, flanks pumping air, a foreleg broken. The lead mule overlooked the disaster with a supercilious expression, as it seemed. Arnaud backhanded it across the muzzle with all his strength but the mule scarcely bothered to draw back its head.
“Well, kill it then,” Arnaud told Orion, as the black made his way to the head of the train. He turned his back, and waited for the horse’s final sigh of expiration before he looked again. The tendons stretched tight across Orion’s back as he squatted, straining to shove the dead horse off the trail into the gorge. Arnaud watched from where he stood. He felt a revulsion against touching the animal’s dead hide. Orion gave an enormous heave and the horse tumbled over the edge with limp legs flailing at the air and slid down the damp slope, crushing saplings and tearing away vines. A few yards down the carcass snagged on a cylindrical cluster of bamboo and hung there. Orion stood up, gasping from his effort. He looked over the edge and clicked his tongue.
They went on, Orion leading the pack train afoot, while Arnaud listlessly sat the uncomfortable mule saddle. Orion’s mount required little guidance and Arnaud let it pick its own way without interference. Still their progress was slow. They made their way around a deep involution of the gorge, from which the trail wrapped around another outcropping. At this vantage they could again see the horse’s carcass rucked up into the bamboo, but the sight of it was fading in the quickly thickening dusk.
Arnaud saw that they would spend the night on the mountain after all. They camped, if one could call it that, across the trail itself. Out of the dark came a smell of corruption, and Arnaud thought of the horse, though it hardly could have decayed so soon. At last he realized it was the birds Orion had shot, deliquescent in the saddlebag. He scooped them out and pitched them into the ravine. They had not water enough for him to rinse his hands; he scrabbled his fingers in the damp leaves and brushed them off but a vague odor of rot still clung to them. He interrupted Orion’s effort to start a fire; there was nothing to cook and he did not want to show a light. They were not provisioned for an overnight stay but there were some cooked yams in a saddlebag. Arnaud ate one of these without interest and left the rest for his slave.
The rain forest clouds sealed off the sky, raining on them fitfully. Arnaud huddled in his thin clothes. It was unpleasantly chilly, and remained so even when the rain stopped and a rent opened in the clouds so that the stars again appeared. The mules were restless on their short tethers and often Orion had to rise to quiet them. Arnaud did not think he slept at all, but when his eyes opened onto daylight he felt that he had been dreaming something which left him with a strange sense of dread. He thought his wife had somehow figured in the dream, though he could not remember it, and though he almost never dreamed of her.
His leg had stiffened in the night and was so sore he had to bite back a groan when he mounted the mule. Up the ravine, the dead horse’s belly had swelled and its legs stuck out rigidly from it. Arnaud ground his teeth and started down the trail. The day was fair and clear, and the sun and the saddle’s movement seemed to soften his injury. As they descended, the undergrowth above and below the trail grew dryer. Also there was a smell of smoke which Arnaud could not place, and so far there was no sign of where it came from.
Before noon they reached the ragged edge of the outmost hill where the plain and the Massacre River could be seen. Orion stopped so abruptly that the mule he was leading bumped him with its shoulder. He turned and looked back at Arnaud, aghast. Arnaud had cupped a hand over his mouth; he removed it, briefly, to speak.
“Vasé,” he said, “Go on.” But Orion remained in his frozen position.
“M’ap di ou kou l’yé a,” Arnaud said. “I’m telling you now.” He signaled Orion to proceed.
Orion faced forward and moved off along the trail. Arnaud felt a vague stirring of nausea, perhaps from the mule’s unfamiliar motion. Beyond the Massacre the cane fields were blanketed with a heavy black smoke. Apart from that it was eerily quiet and there was nothing whatsoever to be seen.
At last they came to the river ford and crossed it. Even muleback Arnaud was wet to his knees, but his trousers had dried by the time they reached the priest’s compound. Here they halted the pack train and Arnaud called out but there was no answer. He dismounted with less pain than he’d expected and looked into the ajoupa, then limped to the church. Both houses were unoccupied but seemed in good order; there was no sign of looting or violence, though the fires had burned up to the edge of the clearing where they stood. Seeing this, Arnaud felt somewhat reassured that things were going according to plan; fire was an unsubtle tool, but certainly the show of destruction would be all that Maltrot’s cohort had intended.
He climbed back onto the mule and they continued in the direction of Ouanaminthe at a much more rapid pace than before. Still it was twilight again by the time they entered the town, coming along the Dajabón road and crossing the levee that had been raised along the riverbank. The levee was lined with men standing almost in military postures, though they did not seem to be soldiers. It was already too dark to distinguish their faces at a distance but Arnaud thought it strange that no one hailed them.
In the lead again, he rode up the street in the direction of the government house. Before he could reach it a throng of men surged across the street to bar his way. Many were armed with muskets similar to the ones his mules were bearing, and they were all mulattoes. Arnaud realized that he had not seen a white man since entering the town.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted at a man who had caught his mule’s bridle and so held him arrested. In answer another mulatto poked a bayonet toward his belly, and for the first time he felt a twinge of fear. He looked over his shoulder, but Orion was gone.
Then someone called out a command and the bayonet was lowered from his ribs. A man was striding across from the houses with an air of authority, and the other mulattoes turned expectantly to face him. Arnaud squinted in the dusk and with a flush of relief he recognized the freckled features of Choufleur.
“You’ve come in good time,” Choufleur informed him.
“Yes,” Arnaud said. He looked over his shoulder again; some men were unloading the first two mules in the train and handing out the muskets to other, unarmed mulattoes who were coming out of the side streets in increasing numbers.
“But this must stop at once!” Arnaud called out, and looking at Choufleur, “You must stop them.”
Choufleur said nothing. In the dim, the patterns of his freckles were swimming on his face, though his green eyes were steady and sharp on Arnaud as he lifted his hand. Arnaud wondered if the half-breed expected a handshake. As he was thinking this, Choufleur caught his wrist and tugged him rudely down from the saddle. Arnaud shouted incoherently, more from the insult than the pain of his wrenched leg. He would have slapped Choufleur but two other men had pinned his arms behind him.
“What do you mean by it?” he said. “Where is my servant?” He could feel that his wrists were being tied together with a prickly length of sisal cord.
“You have no servant,” Choufleur said. “There is nothing that you own.”
Arnaud spat at him, but Choufleur stepped aside and let the gob fall in the dust. One of the men behind him gave him a rough shove and tripped him so he fell onto his knees. Choufleur closed a hand on the back of his neck and pressed his head into the dirt, scrubbing his face across his own spittle. Then he jerked him to his feet by his hair.
The two other men hustled him forward, one leading him and the other behind. All down the pack train mulattoes were shouting with pleasure as they received the new weapons. Arnaud caught sight of Père Bonne-chance beyond this throng, standing beside the buildings in his black robes, the sole still point in the confusion swirling around him. Arnaud stared wildly and the priest seemed to look back at him, but with no reaction—as if Arnaud had been rendered invisible. A prod of a bayonet sent him hurrying on.
He was brought to the cellar of a private house which might have been used to store wine, but was empty now except for another white man who had been badly beaten about the face. The faint light that drifted in from a grating near the ceiling was scarcely enough to reveal his battered features, but he raised himself on his elbows and called Arnaud by name. Coming nearer, Arnaud recognized a Ouanaminthe planter named Robineau, some ten years his senior and a slight acquaintance.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “What’s happened here?”
Robineau’s front teeth had been smashed out so his reply was indistinct. “The mulattoes…” he muttered, and did not go on.
“évidemment,” Arnaud said. “Where did they get the guns?”
“Ogé,” Robineau mouthed. “I heard that. The guns were hidden from the Ogé rising.”
Arnaud grunted and walked toward the grating. By standing on tiptoe he could obtain an ankle-level view of the street, full of men hurrying to and fro, calling out to one another in Creole, some carrying torches now. It was awkward to keep his balance without the use of his hands. He crossed the cellar to where Robineau was propped against the wall and lowered himself into a squat.
“Would you be so kind as to get this rope off me?” He wiggled his fingers, which were beginning to swell from the pressure on his wrists, and waited, but the touch he expected did not come. He glanced over his shoulder.
“I don’t think…I shouldn’t…” Robineau looked uneasily toward the door. “Mieux que vous restez comme ?a.”
Arnaud deflated, rolling off his heels to sit down on the cold flagstones, which were thinly covered with dampish straw. In Robineau’s tone and fearful expression he recognized that mood of abject helplessness he’d always sought to inspire in his own slaves, and he felt it would be a matter of minutes or hours at most before he sank into this state himself. The grated window slowly glazed over into total darkness. Arnaud lowered his head. His shoulders ached and he could do nothing to ease them. The mixture of dirt and spit was drying on his cheek and he was unable to wipe it. With his boot he shuffled the straw in front of him into a little mound.
Presently the door opened and Choufleur entered, carrying a candle. “Get up,” he said, pointing to Arnaud.
Arnaud squinted at him, blinking at the candle’s flame. Robineau had twisted his face away from the light. Arnaud raised himself again into a squat and when he saw that Choufleur made no move to help him rise he pushed himself all the way up unassisted, scraping his shoulder along the wall for balance.
At Choufleur’s gesture, he preceded him out of the room and mounted the stairs, the freckled mulatto coming behind with the candle. When they reached the street Choufleur clamped his arm above the elbow and guided him toward another building, nearer the government house. By now there was less commotion in the street, but Arnaud could hear musket shots from the edge of town, along with shouts that suggested celebration more than battle.
“I want to show you something,” Choufleur said.
They entered the second house and Choufleur conducted him to a ground-floor room, furnished as an office. There were many mulattoes gathered round the desk but no one took note of their entry, and they remained standing in the shadows by the doorway. The others were all drinking wine from the necks of various bottles which they held. Arnaud’s eye was reluctantly drawn to a large light-skinned man dressed in elaborate military uniform, raising a wine bottle and bubbling it with its butt thrust at the roof.
“Candi,” Choufleur muttered. “Vous n’avez pas fait sa connaissance?”
Arnaud said nothing. The group around the desk parted and now he could see, seated behind it, a white man with graying hair who must have occupied a post of authority there, though now his arms were bound to the chair and he was so tightly gagged that the corners of his mouth were bleeding. His eyes were round and watery in the light of the oil lamp that stood on the desk. Candi set the wine bottle down and picked up the corkscrew that lay beside the lamp.
Choufleur’s hand tightened on Arnaud’s arm. “Regardez,” he said. “Attention.”
Candi wound the old cork meticulously from the screw, and lightly tried the point of the instrument against the ball of his left thumb. He stooped, smiling, and placed the screw gently against the white man’s eyeball and with a slow precision began to turn it in. The white man went rigid against the chair back, and from behind the gag came a strangulated retching sound. Arnaud’s eyes squeezed shut and he bit into his lip. He heard Choufleur’s voice in the dark, rapturously tonguing an English phrase.
“Out, vile jelly,” and in French again, “Does it not remind you of the blinding of Gloucester?” He noticed Arnaud then, and slapped him so that his eyes popped open. “Watch, or you will take his place. You must see.”
Arnaud obeyed, his lids pinned back. He was having difficulty with his breathing.
“Take out the gag,” Candi said, and one of the others quickly did so. What came from the white man’s mouth was a kind of sigh, an aaahhhhh. One eyelid sagged over the bloody socket while the other eye rolled evasively. Candi sighted down the length of the corkscrew. The white man’s howl was deafening when he drove it in, with a delicate gradual rotation that finally brought his knuckles flush against the other’s cheek. Candi’s teeth clenched, his forearm tensed: he yanked. There was a sucking plop, followed by a shout of appreciation all around the room. The eyeball was larger than Arnaud would have thought possible, and pudgy, like a dumpling. It depended from a number of white twisting tentacle-like cords, till someone reached with a knife to cut it completely free.
Candi held the eyeball high on the screw and grinned and laughed at it. He did a little dance step, boot heels clicking on the floor. Arnaud’s bowels will-lessly released and he felt that he was soiling his trousers. Choufleur turned and inspected him with an extraordinary satisfaction.
“But probably you have not read Shakespeare at all,” Choufleur said. “You see that my education is superior to yours.”
Without saying anything more, Choufleur returned him to the cellar across the street, and went away closing the door silently behind him. Robineau had disappeared. The clump of straw was wetter than it had been, dripping actually, when Arnaud stirred it with his foot. It reeked of blood. Arnaud was loathe to sit down anywhere. He was aware of the stench and the clinging damp of the feces that coated the insides of his legs. The white man’s scream still buzzed, distorted, in his inner ear. In his mind’s eye the dead horse appeared, bloated with its necrid gasses. He stood below the grating, straining to see out; there was a column of men tramping along the street. In the aureole of their torchlight the face of Père Bonne-chance appeared.
“I will hear your confession, my child, if you desire it,” the priest said.
Arnaud wondered if he might not be hallucinating. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” The priest vanished from beyond the grating, and a moment later the door swung open.
“But how did you get in?” Arnaud said.
“It wasn’t locked,” the priest said. “There’s no lock on it, but you’ve been distracted. Hurry, you must go in front.”
When they reached the street the priest pushed Arnaud’s head down so it was bowed and went along half a pace behind him, chanting a paternoster in Latin. The column continued to pass in the opposite direction alongside them, most of the men now blacks dressed as field hands, but carrying the muskets Arnaud had inadvertently provided. Some glanced at them curiously as they went by, but took no further notice.
Père Bonne-chance led Arnaud down another street toward the levee and thence out onto the Dajabón road. There were bonfires lit on the levee’s height and men were crying out to the stars and firing off their muskets at the sky and pouring rum from broken barrels onto the flames to make them leap. They had not got very far along the road from these festivities before they heard a party of horsemen approaching from the opposite direction.
“Quickly,” the priest said, and hauled Arnaud down the steep bank into the river. The water was suddenly, surprisingly deep. Arnaud felt the priest’s hand cupped under his chin, supporting him, till his flailing boot found footing on a rock. He could hear the jingle of harness as the horses passed, though he could not see them. The priest’s hands worked around his wrists and as he gratefully fanned his fingers over the surface of the water he saw the length of sisal rope go drifting downriver, twisting palely in the current like a snake.
“They would have killed you,” Arnaud said. “Did you not see what inhuman monsters they are?”
“It may be that they follow the old dispensation,” the priest said. The skirts of his habit came floating up around him. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
“They might have done worse than kill you, indeed,” Arnaud said, scarcely listening to his own words. With delight he felt the river purging the filth from between his legs.
“Oh, the ones who are superstitious would fear to harm me,” the priest said. “Those who are educated would dislike to offend the Church.” He clambered out onto the bank and peeled out of his robes and wrung them out. Arnaud followed him, pulling off his own wet things, scrubbing his trousers on a stone as he had seen slave women do.
“But you are not really even a priest,” he said.
“Because I am not chaste, you say this,” Père Bonne-chance said. Arnaud could see his bullet head thrusting about in the strange light. The stars were mostly obscured by persistent smoke and they were now well away from the fires on the levee, but the sky gave off a weird red glow reflected from the burning cane fields.
“But I must believe that God approves of love,” Père Bonne-chance said. He bundled his wet robe on his shoulder and began walking barefoot and naked along the roadside. Arnaud followed, naked himself but for his boots, which he was too tenderfooted to go without.
The priest looked back once over his pale and hairy shoulder. “No love is wasted,” he said, with a faint smile. Arnaud nodded, though he did not understand. Boots squelching, he kept on following the priest into the dark.